On November 5 mid-day reported how a 13-year-old boy from Badlapur, along with a few other kids, had planned to run away from home, and meet in Goa to “start a new life”. According to their plans, the boy had asked members of his group on an app to come to Goa. They planned to pose as orphans and get a certificate from a Goa orphanage. They eventually wanted to go abroad and invest in bitcoins and earn money. The police traced the kids eventually to a Goa hotel, and got them back to Mumbai.

But it’s not Instagram or Facebook that the children have used to coordinate with each other. They used Discord, a concept devised by Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games. It is a VoIP, instant messaging and digital distribution platform. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called “servers”. Discord is also one of the apps which hides the identity of the user allowing them to interact through open as well closed groups.