Strategies to trick others online, in the classroom & in construction

(1) One of the oldest tricks in the book

I mean, seriously, who hasn’t tried a fake moustache at some time in their life?

One of the funniest things in the news in 2026, in this instance a strategy to fool age verification software…

“U.K.-based nonprofit Internet Matters surveyed a thousand children about age-verification checks online, and about half said that age checks were easy to bypass.

“Children demonstrated a clear awareness of how to bypass age checks, either through their own experiences or by hearing about methods from others,” the report says.

“One technique brought up was children drawing facial hair on themselves so that the tools verifying them would think they were older, which was reported as working in multiple instances,” it added…

“This is not the first known bypass that kids have figured out in recent months since the rise in rollouts of age-verification checks. Some kids have found that pointing their webcam at adult-looking characters in video games also worked, or in other cases, simply pulling obscure or funny faces was enough to skirt the checks altogether.”*

* Whittaker, Z., “Some kids are bypassing age-verification checks with a fake mustache,” Techcrunch (May 6 2026); https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/06/some-kids-are-bypassing-age-verification-checks-with-a-fake-mustache/