By initially fibbing about their age during sign-up, teens claim to be over 18, according to TechCrunch.
Later, when parents step in and link their accounts through TikTok’s parental controls, the access granted by the original lie remains intact.
The result? These underage users still have full access to the adults-only shop tab, turning the platform’s safeguards into merely more than a speed bump.
TikTok’s Family Pairing feature lets parents manage a teen’s screen time, content choices, and account privacy by linking their accounts within the app.
Here’s how it works: the teen accesses the feature from the app’s settings and selects “Teen” when prompted with “Who is using this TikTok account?” They then scan their parent’s QR code after the parent completes the same steps, selecting “Parent” and displaying their QR code for the teen to scan.
This setup gives parents control, but the loophole remains, allowing underage users to access the adults-only Shop tab.
Setting up parental controls should alert TikTok that the younger user previously lied about their age.
However, it doesn’t. Instead, the “Shop” tab, which sits alongside TikTok’s “For You” and “Following” feeds, remains accessible to the minor, even with parental control activated.
This oversight means that despite parents taking charge of key account settings, underage users can still browse and buy through the adults-only Shop tab.
Since the Shop is an 18+ experience, parents should be aware that their teen might encounter adult items in the app.
These include sex toys (sometimes labeled as “massagers” or disguised as makeup brushes), lingerie, hemp products, supplements, weight gainers, vape pens, and more.
TikTok has also struggled to keep various banned goods off the marketplace, as reported by Business Insider.
Without a way to verify the date of birth associated with a TikTok account in the app, TechCrunch tested the policy loophole around TikTok Shop.
They created a new account for a user over the age of 18, then paired it with an adult’s account through Family Pairing.
This scenario mirrors a real-world situation where a teen lies about their age to create a TikTok account and is later required by a parent to enable parental controls.
Despite the pairing, the underage user retains access to the adults-only Shop tab.
After extensive testing, the website concluded that while changes may eventually take effect, the Shop
tab remains accessible unless Restricted Mode is enabled by the parent of the teen who falsified their age – a process that proved more intricate in our experiments.
According to TechCrunch, the future of TikTok Shop’s loophole closure remains uncertain, especially as the feature holds potential to become a cornerstone of the social app, despite potential short-term financial losses.
Meanwhile, the TikTok Shop continues to attract younger shoppers and scales sellers’ reach to millions of users.
By directly linking influencers’ videos to products, it stimulates impulse buying and provides Gen Z with a user-friendly alternative to Amazon, Temu, and other e-commerce platforms.
