A Connecticut mother is stuck with a $16,000 credit card bill after her six-year-old son went on a spending spree while playing a video game on her iPad. Jessica Johnson noticed $2,500 in charges to her card in July and thought the charges were strange. She contacted her bank, believing the unitemized charges from PayPal and Apple.com were fraudulent.
“The way the charges get bundled made it almost impossible [to figure out that] they were from a game,” she told the New York Post.
By the time she filed a fraud claim, the charges had topped $16,000. In October, she was told by her bank that the charges were legitimate and she needed to contact Apple if she wanted a refund.
A customer service agent explained that the purchases were for gold coins in the game Sonic Forces. It turns out her son George had been buying bundles of the in-game currency so he could upgrade his characters and get other in-game rewards. He started buying bundles of rings for $1.99 but soon started purchasing larger bundles for $99.99.
“It’s like my six-year-old was doing lines of cocaine — and doing bigger and bigger hits,” Johnson joked.
Unfortunately, Apple informed Johnson that they would not refund the charges because she waited too long to file a claim.
“[Apple] said, ‘Tough.’ They told me that, because I didn’t call within 60 days of the charges, that they can’t do anything,” said Jessica. “The reason I didn’t call within 60 days is because Chase told me it was likely fraud — that PayPal and Apple.com are top fraud charges.”
Apple refused to budge, even as she pleaded that she would be unable to make her mortgage payments. They told her it was her fault and that she could have used the security settings to prevent her son from making purchases.
“Obviously, if I had known there was a setting for that, I wouldn’t have allowed my six-year-old to run up nearly $20,000 in charges for virtual gold rings,” she said. “These games are designed to be completely predatory and get kids to buy things. What grown-up would spend $100 on a chest of virtual gold coins?”
While Johson figures out how she is going to pay back the money her son spent, she urged other parents to check the settings on their devices.
“Check your security settings. I’m appalled that this is even possible in these games and that Apple devices are not pre-set to prevent this.”
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