A child sits at the computer, chatting back and forth with an AI while lines of what looks like program code scroll down the screen. From across the room, you can't really tell what they are doing. Scenes like this will only become more common at home.
If a child has taken an interest in programming, that is something to be glad about. But that same doorway now opens in directions few parents anticipate.
The 14-Year-Old Who Unsubscribed 46,000 Accounts
In July 2026, Tokyo's Metropolitan Police re-arrested a 15-year-old high school freshman from Saitama Prefecture on suspicion of obstructing business by fraudulent means. He is alleged to have sent false data to the servers of the video streaming service Bandai Channel and forcibly unsubscribed roughly 47,000 user accounts, temporarily shutting the service down. At the time of the attack he was 14 — a third-year junior high school student. He told investigators that he completed the illegal program using the conversational AI ChatGPT.
It was not the first case with this shape. In February 2025, three boys aged 14 to 16 were arrested on suspicion of unauthorized access to Rakuten Mobile. Using a self-made program, they mass-tested leaked IDs and passwords circulating online, fraudulently signed up mobile-network contracts, and resold them — earning cryptocurrency worth about 7.5 million yen. The program, again, was built with the help of ChatGPT, and one stated motive was "I wanted attention on social media." Two more 16-year-olds who copied the method were later arrested as well.
One in Three People Arrested for Unauthorized Access Is a Teenager
These are not isolated outliers. According to figures published in March 2026 by Japan's National Public Safety Commission and other agencies, of the 248 people arrested in 2025 for violating the Unauthorized Computer Access Law, 81 — 32.7% — were aged 14 to 19, the highest number in five years. Seven children under 14, too young to be held criminally responsible, were also taken into police guidance; the youngest was just 10 years old.
・People arrested for violating the Unauthorized Computer Access Law: 248
・Of those, aged 14–19: 81 (32.7%) — a five-year high (60 in 2021 → 81 in 2025)
・Children under 14 taken into police guidance: 7 (youngest: age 10)
What the Boys Lacked Was Not Talent
Commenting on the Bandai Channel case, Masakatsu Morii, professor emeritus of Kobe University and a cybersecurity specialist, warns against the tendency to celebrate such boys as "geniuses." What lies behind these incidents, he argues, is most likely not advanced talent but a hunger for attention and an immature sense of right and wrong. Attack methods and code fragments are already all over the internet, and generative AI will assemble them on request. We have entered an era, he concludes, in which "anyone with the will — even an elementary or junior high school student — can carry it out."
What must not be overlooked is that every one of these boys was identified and arrested. Internet communication always leaves traces: IP addresses and connection records. Access logs, contract details, cryptocurrency transaction records — investigators can follow all of them. The more deeply someone understands technology, the better they know that getting away with it is impossible. AI will lend a child the power to write a program, but it will not lend them this understanding. The boys acquired only the knowledge of how to make the program run, and crossed the line without knowing what was being recorded behind it.
Teach How It Works — and the Imagination to See Who Gets Hurt
Taking away AI or the computer does not change this structure. AI that writes code will remain within every child's reach. What is needed is to teach children — before they learn to misuse it — how networks operate, where records remain, and what the law calls these acts. Understanding the mechanism steers a child's abundant curiosity toward building and protecting, and at the same time it is the surest deterrent: it makes clear that you will always be caught.
Alongside that, we should teach the power to imagine what lies beyond the act. Run one program, and 47,000 people suddenly lose access to a service they use, while others scramble to restore it. And if you are arrested, your own family's life changes overnight. The person struggling on the other side of the screen, and the family sitting next to you — how concretely a child can picture those faces is the ethical sense that guards the final line. The motive "I wanted attention" is the flip side of exactly this missing imagination.
Digital Kodomo BASE teaches children in Ota City, Tokyo, how to use computers, programming, and AI — free of charge. Not keeping children away from technology, but helping them understand it correctly and deeply, and raising children who can imagine the people on the other end of that technology: we believe that is what adults can do to keep a child who has learned to write code from ending up on the wrong side of an arrest report.