A new report reveals that children across the UK are outwitting online safety measures with fake birthdays, borrowed IDs, and some surprisingly creative facial hair. A third of children say they have bypassed online age checks in the past two months - some by drawing fake moustaches on their faces to trick facial recognition software. The report from Internet Matters titled The Online Safety Act: Are Children Safer Online? surveyed 1,270 children aged 9-16 and their parents across the United Kingdom to see whether the country's landmark online safety legislation is delivering any meaningful protection for children. One mother told researchers she caught her son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face to pass a platform's facial age estimation check. It worked. He was verified as 15. He was 12. What did the report find out? The study discovered that 46% of children believe age checks are easy to bypass, while only 17% say they are difficult. Among the infiltration methods children described were entering a fake birthdate, using someone else's identification, submitting videos of other people's faces, and using video game characters to fool facial recognition tools. "I've seen clips of people online where they'll get clips of video game characters like turning their head and use it for age verification," one 11-year-old girl told researchers. Older children were more confident about circumventing checks, with 52% of those aged 13 and over saying age verification is easy to beat, compared with 41%of those aged 12 and under. The most common reasons children gave for bypassing age checks were to access a social media platform they were not old enough to use (34%), to join an online game or gaming community (30%), and to use a messaging app (29%). The report also found that just over