The Croatian police have arrested at least three young men - one of them a minor - for a wave of fake bomb threats sent to schools in Croatia. The coordination ran through gaming chats, and the messages followed a similar template across several cities, with a fake "terror cell" signature.

The numbers are large: around 220 bomb threats in the last 48 hours. Schools in Zagreb went into lockdown, parents arrived in panic, pupils were sent home. The police worked across several regions in Croatia at the same time to close down the sources.

All these messages used gaming communication groups. Not WhatsApp. Not Telegram. Gaming chats - Discord, Steam, much more widely used among 12, 13, 14-year-olds. An age you wouldn't expect to be involved in a "coordinated criminal action", but one that has every tool for it on its own computer.

This pattern isn't only Croatian. Similar campaigns have happened in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina over the past two years. In Macedonia too - the University building has been shut down repeatedly after anonymous threats that later turned out to be false. One case is an incident. 220 in two countries in a week is a trend.

The question for parents and the education system is not "when will they catch them". It's "why are children finding this funny or interesting". Gaming culture has for years intersected with forms of violence, provocation and fake authority. When one group of kids can stop the schools of an entire country from operating, we're not in a "juvenile incident". We're in a question of operational capability.

In the Balkans this pattern needs to be read carefully. Not because we don't have a younger population with gadgets here. Because we are in the same digital environment and the same risk. Close one group, another opens. All of us - schools, police, parents - are one step late behind the game.