This mom isn’t playing around.
Kelly Medina Enos, mother of two and British media personality, shares a “really scary” cautionary tale about a toy she bought for her 4-year-old son George.
Enos claims that somehow an “adult male” took control of the walkie-talkie he ordered on Amazon.
“Fundamentally, IMO they are not safe children’s toys. Again, I am very sorry for not being more aware of the risks involved.” Enos posted on TikTok last week. “I hope you understand that if I’m using something on my child, you can trust that I believed it to be safe.”
She said she heard a strange voice while George was sleeping, and she couldn’t immediately pinpoint where it was coming from.
“I could clearly hear someone talking,” Enos said in the five-minute video, which has been viewed more than 871,800 times.
“We’re thinking, maybe someone’s walking back from the pub or something and we’re having a conversation, and they’re chatting outside the front of our house. , I thought,” she added.
She said she checked her Ring doorbell and found no one near her home.
Then she remembered that she and George were playing with walkie-talkies and one of them was left on.
“What I heard on the walkie-talkie was an adult male saying, ‘Hello? Are you there? Hello, mom,'” Enos recalled.
She said she turned off the toy and threw it away, coming to the shocking realization that anyone could jump on the walkie-talkie.
“Please don’t make the same mistake I did,” she told her followers. She also apologized for sharing a link to the toy on another TikTok, saying that recommending something means she thinks it’s safe.
“If this helps educate more people, I’m happy,” she said.
The newspaper reached out to Enos for comment.
Some commenters on TikTok said they had similar horrifying experiences.
“The same thing happened to my little one! A grown man came and said I was under the bed! It was really scary, they were immediately thrown in the trash!” 1 person shared.
“This can happen with baby monitors too. Parents be careful,” another person warned.
“Our walkie-talkie was hooked up to the frequency from the talkback baby monitor. Mom was kind enough to ask us to take the f off the frequency,” laughed a third.
This isn’t the first time parents have reported something similar happening with their children’s toys.
Back in the fall, a mother said her 1-year-old daughter’s baby monitor was hacked.
A 2023 study by the consumer watchdog group also warned about toys that “surveill” children.
of US PIRG Educational Fund said certain toys that record children’s voices, images, locations and other information pose a risk to children’s safety and privacy.
The organization also noted that more toys are taking advantage of technological features, even when it doesn’t seem like it.
