My eight-year-old son ordered an AK-47 and ammunition from the dark web

A mother warns of the dangers of the ‘dark web’ after her eight-year-old son managed to order a gun and ammunition.

Barbara Gemen, a human resources expert in the Netherlands, revealed her horror after an AK-47 showed up on her doorstep.

She said her son, whom she wishes to keep anonymous, was “very excited” that he had managed to get hold of the package – which had been routed through nearby Poland and Bulgaria to evade customs checks – after using the dark web.

But the shocked mother handed over the gun to the authorities. The police and his school took no action, she said.

A package containing an AK-47 arrived at Mrs Gemen’s doorstep (stock image)

Ms Gemen said: “It sounds like something out of a movie, but I was shocked to learn that my eight-year-old son had embarked on a journey to become a cyberhacker, a path paved with alarming choices and lasting consequences.”

Her son, now 20 years old, was an avid gamer in his youth, regularly staying up late into the night playing computer games.

The youngster even took a job to get paid by others to level up their accounts for when they log in on weekends.

But Ms Gemen said things took a turn for the worse when he encountered what she called a group of cybercriminals in an online game.

He started with small actions like ordering a pizza online without paying, but Gemen said he then started using bank accounts to launder money for others – using computer games to mask the transactions.

She said she learned afterwards that her son had spent weeks on Internet forums figuring out how to order the gun and make sure it arrived safely at his home address.

He would hide his activities from her using code words, she said, such as saying “Pitt joins us” when she entered the room while he was online.

Speak against EuroNews, she added: “My son started hacking at the age of eight. And then he ordered a gun.

“I think he spent a month trying to figure out how to order the gun and get it delivered to our house.

“He opened it and he was very, very excited that he managed to get a gun delivered to our house.

‘[But] I was completely shocked. I immediately decided to do things differently at home.’

The weapon was ordered via the dark web, a part of the internet where there are no public links and which can only be accessed with special software such as Tor.

In illicit dark web markets, everything from guns to illegal drugs can be bought freely with cryptocurrency.

The boy teamed up with an international group of hackers and got up in the middle of the night to “work,” with the criminals luring him into increasingly serious hacking.

Ms Gemen said she received little support from the police or the boy’s school and educated herself on cybercrime by going through his browsing history and looking up terms online.

Kaspersky research found that only 11 percent of parents believe their child would be capable of committing cybercrime.

Kaspersky research found that only 11 percent of parents believe their child would be capable of committing cybercrime.

Mrs. Gemen has quit her old job and is now committed to children who have become involved in cybercrime.

She said: ‘It’s so easy these days because a lot of kids have laptops and cell phones and you can basically hack into it with a few clicks. It’s a pretty big deal to prevent young people from hacking. They often don’t know what is legal or illegal.’

She says parents should set “cyber boundaries” to keep children safe.

A 2019 Michigan State University study found that young boys who spent time playing video games and had the freedom to do whatever they wanted on the internet were more likely to be involved in hacking.

Young people who have had their own telephone from an early age are more likely to be hacked.

Gemen said: ‘It is imperative that we educate and protect young minds from the fuzzy confines of a digital environment’.