Starting young
The UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has revealed that children “as young as seven are being referred to Britain’s national cyber crime intervention programme,” with an ex-teen hacker saying that parents are blind to their kids’ actions.
According to Sky News Money on Monday, the NCA is seeing a major increase in referrals to the program mostly from gamers aged ten to 16, while insurance payouts to hacked UK firms “have rocketed 230%.”
games are “even more vulnerable right now”
Florida native Ricky Handschumacher, now 32, received a four-year federal prison sentence for stealing $7.6m in cryptocurrency when he was just 15. Handschumacher told Money that his introduction to hacking came from a video game, stating, however, that the games are “even more vulnerable right now than back then because it’s so mainstream.”
Handschumacher warned that teen hackers were “growing more and more.”
“You have to really pay attention to what your kid’s doing. You may think ‘my kid would never do that,’ but don’t be so sure. Some of these 15, 16-year-olds, they’re sitting on millions.”
UK under attack
NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit senior officer Jonathan Broadbent said at least 105 referrals have come in this financial year.
Backing this up is the impact these hackers have had on the UK industry this year. In April, high street retailer Marks & Spencer lost £136m ($181m) to a cyber-attack, while Jaguar Land Rover factories suffered the same fate for five weeks in August, causing an estimated £1.9bn ($2.5bn) in disruption to the UK economy.
Attackers also caused Transport for London months of disruption, while infant retail chain Kido was held to ransom in September.
According to Sky, teens and young adults were among the suspects in every incident.
Every hacker is a gamer”
The Hacking Games (THG) founder Fergus Hay backed up the link to gaming, confirmed by Handschumacher and reformed hacker Joseph Harris, stating: “Every hacker is a gamer, and that’s because it’s puzzle-solving and logic mindsets.”
Harris, now 28, was famously arrested by Secret Service agents outside a Missouri gas station and jailed for stealing $14m in cryptocurrency in 2018. Harris said his introduction to crime came in 2010 when he found a bug in Disney’s Club Penguin that enabled him to force the multiplayer online game “to loop when he collected coins, affording him rare items from the in-game shop.”
According to reports, Harris gained access to Club Penguin accounts that owned in-game items and sold the hacked accounts to game enthusiasts for $2,000 at the age of 13.
“It sounds silly because it’s a children’s game, but some of those items were worth thousands of dollars,” he said. Harris, who stole just under $30m in crypto the year he was arrested, said the motivation for the crime was “the thrill, the rush you get from getting those big numbers.”
Harnessing talent
According to reports, UK cyber attacks and the likes of those suffered in the US, particularly by Las Vegas casino firms, have exposed a “moderate-to-critical skills gap” with the World Economic Forum revealing a worldwide staff shortfall of four million people.
Hay, whose firm redirects teen hackers into lawful jobs in cybersecurity, said the industry was looking in the wrong places, such as LinkedIn, and that employers expect “computer science degrees and other official certificates.”
missing “an entire generation”
Hay stated that such companies were missing “an entire generation who are developing their skills in non-conventional areas like gaming.”
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- Source: https://www.vegasslotsonline.com/news/2025/12/08/ex-teen-hackers-reveals-origin-in-gaming-warns-kids-are-stealing-millions/
