A six-year-old might have put himself on Santa’s naughty list this holiday season after he racked up $16,000 in video game charges on his mother’s credit card.
George Johnson secretly built up $16,000 in credit card charges through Apple app store payments for his favorite video game, Sonic Forces, the New York Post reported.
While working from home during the coronavirus pandemic, Jessica Johnson, a real estate broker from Wilton, Connecticut, did not realize that the younger of her two sons used her iPad to go on a shopping spree.
Throughout July, George bought boosters beginning with $1.99 red rings and moving up to $99.99 gold rings, all of which allowed him to unlock characters and speed bonuses.
On July 9, when Jessica was working in the next room, George racked up 25 charges with a value of $2,500.
“It’s like my 6-year-old was doing lines of cocaine — and doing bigger and bigger hits,” she joked of her first-grader.
Once Jessica realized that Apple and PayPal were withdrawing sums totaling hundreds of dollars from her bank account, she assumed it was a mistake by the bank or fraud.
Still clueless that the charges were coming from her son, Jessica filed a fraud claim that month when her bill reached $16,293.10.
In October, Chase told her the charges were hers and she needed to get in touch with Apple to settle the charges.
She realized it was her son only after she itemized the charges while getting in touch with an Apple representative.
“[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.”
The customer service representative was less than forgiving of her situation, telling her that there is a setting to keep incidents like this from happening. A 2019 survey found that one in five parents use parental settings to keep their kids from racking up unwanted charges.
Jessica admitted that she did not know about the setting, but blamed the “predatory” nature of the game for getting her son addicted enough to spend thousands on a video game.
“These games are designed to be completely predatory and get kids to buy things,” she said. “What grown-up would spend $100 on a chest of virtual gold coins?”
The Financial Times reported that video games top the list of pocket money spending while in lockdown due to the coronavirus.
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