Under the UK’s recently enacted Online Safety Act, websites hosting adult content are required to implement robust age verification systems. However, some users have already identified ways to bypass these measures—most notably by leveraging realistic in-game assets from video games such the Death Stranding franchise to deceive facial recognition tools.
The law, enforced from July 25 and regulated by Ofcom, requires websites hosting adult content—including social and gaming platforms like Discord, Reddit, and Grindr—to verify users’ ages through methods such as ID uploads, facial recognition, or credit card authentication.
Despite these legal measures, some users have already identified workarounds. Notably, using Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2’s photo mode could bypass Discord’s K-id facial verification system. The process involves using a close-up of protagonist Sam Porter Bridges—rendered with high facial realism—to meet the verification criteria, which require facial movements like opening and closing the mouth. The in-game expression controls make this possible, before showig Sam’s face to their phone camera to gain access to restricted channels.
K-id, a biometric age verification tool using real-time video selfies with liveness detection or ID scans to estimate age and confirm identity, states that no verification data is stored, making the method difficult to detect retrospectively.
While this workaround targets Discord’s facial recognition system, it highlights broader concerns about the reliability of biometric age verification under the Online Safety Act—particularly as hyper-realistic video game graphics and advancing AI increasingly blur the line between real and synthetic imagery.