Mark Donovan

About

I built LifeQuest after my own kid got hit. Late 2023, on a quiet Saturday afternoon, my 13-year-old son clicked through a "free Robux" generator from a YouTube link he trusted. His Roblox account was gone in 90 seconds. Items he'd spent two years collecting — vaporized. His Discord friends list became the next target — every contact got the same scam DM from his hijacked account within minutes.

The hardest part wasn't the lost items. It was that he hid it from us for three days because he was embarrassed. Three days of him quietly trying to fix it on his own while I had no idea anything was wrong.

That week I started LifeQuest. The kind of training I wished he'd had — not a lecture, not a 20-minute YouTube video, but a simulator where the wrong choice teaches you faster than I ever could from across the dinner table. A place to make the mistakes before the real money and real friends are on the line.

I'm a dad of two teens — a 15-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son. I've spent 15 years in product design and writing about the consumer internet. LifeQuest is what happens when those two things collide with parenthood.

What I write about

• Teen online safety & scam patterns — Roblox scams, Discord phishing, deepfakes, sextortion, hacked accounts, AI-generated social engineering. The exact playbooks scammers run on kids in 2026.
• Recovery scripts — what to actually say in the first ten minutes when your teen comes to you after they've been scammed, lost an account, or sent something they regret. The conversation that determines whether they'll come to you the next time.
• FOMO spending and the parenting trap — loot boxes, in-app purchases, the "it's their own money" rationalization, and what we changed at our house after the third charge-back month.
• Screen-time without surveillance — what works in our family, what didn't, why parental-control apps stopped being our main tool, and what replaced them.
• Family game nights with LifeQuest — what I've learned about my own kids by sitting next to them while they play through scenarios I designed.

Editorial approach

Every article on this blog is built from three inputs:

1. Lived experience first. Every scam pattern, every dinner-table fight, every recovery script in our content is one I've either watched my own kids encounter or seen in our local parent group. If I haven't lived it, I won't pretend I have.
2. Sources you can verify. FTC Consumer Sentinel data, FBI IC3 reports, Stanford Internet Observatory studies, NCMEC, platform safety transparency reports (Roblox, Discord, Meta), MalwareTips forum observations. Every claim links to its source.
3. Plain language under 10 minutes. If a guide takes longer to read than the dinner-table conversation it's preparing you for, it's too long. Concrete steps. No moralizing. No hand-wringing.

If a piece gets updated based on new data or a platform change, the Updated date moves and the change is noted in the sources list. Nothing rotted into stealth-revisions.

Contact

Find LifeQuest on X / Twitter and YouTube. I read everything, and I'm especially interested in scam patterns you're seeing in your own family that aren't in our coverage yet.