Sometimes you become a victim of financial loss not because of any illegal fraud but because the children of yours who call themselves tech-savvy and start experimenting on your phone. A similar incident has shocked Jessica Johnson when she suddenly discovered that US $16,000 has been deducted from her savings account and was paid to Apple Store.
She later found that the money was deducted from her account when her six-year-old son George Johnson was busy making in-app purchases on Apple's App Store for his favourite video game, Sonic Forces on iPad.
The Notorious Deal
According to a report published in New York Post, Jessica was shocked to find that her six-year-old son has made in-app purchases worth $16,000 on Apple App Store using the iPad. The report said that the six-year-old had bought add-on boosters for his game, starting with Red Rings ($ 1.99) and moving up to Gold Rings worth $ 99.99, allowing George to access new characters and more speed, spending hundreds of dollars at a time.
These purchases were made over the month of June, and went unnoticed by the mother until July 9, when she saw 25 charges on her credit card totaling $ 2,500 (roughly Rs 1,80,000). Johnson discovered that Apple and PayPal were withdrawing hefty sums from her Chase account. She assumed initially that it was a fraud and contacted the bank.
"The way the charges get bundled made it almost impossible [to figure out that] they were from a game," she was quoted in the New York Post as saying.
Not knowing about her little one's deeds, Johnson filed a fraud claim when her bill reached $ 16,293.10 (Rs 11.99 lakh) but it wasn't until October that she was told that the charges were indeed hers and she needs to contact Apple for the same.
The Apple Addiction
Upon reaching out to Apple, she realised that it was her six-year-old who went on a spending spree on his favourite iPad game. The New York Post report said that she was walked through a buried list of all the charges. "You wouldn't know how to find it without someone directing you," Johnson was quoted as saying.
Further, she said that Apple could not help as they weren't contacted within 60 days of the charges. She said that she didn't call then because Chase told her it could likely be a fraud.
Apple has parental controls that allow parents to monitor what their kid is browsing on their Apple devices. There are settings to limit purchases or accessing some of the apps. But when asked the mother why she did not enable parental controls, Johnson told them that even she was unaware of the same.
The woman admitted that she hadn't put any preventive settings on her account, because she has little knowledge about turning them on.
"Obviously, if I had known there was a setting for that, I wouldn't have allowed my 6-year-old to run up nearly $ 20,000 in charges for virtual gold rings," the report quoted her as saying. When confronted by his mother, the six-year-old George was quoted as saying, "Well, I'll pay you back, mom."
However, Jessica blames Apple and the game designers. She says that these games are designed to be predatory and get kids into buying things instantly. On blaming Apple, she said that her son did not understand that the money was for real.
"How could he? He's playing a cartoon game in a world that he knows is not real. Why would the money be real to him? That would require a big cognitive leap," she said further.
