6-Year-Old Spends Over $16,000 on iPad Game
A young boy in Wilton, Connecticut, spent over $16,000 of his mother's money playing the video game Sonic Forces.
Six-year-old George Johnson bought thousands of dollars of "rings" in the game using his mother's iPad, which was connected to her credit card. The rings, which allowed him to buy new characters and improve them, started at less than $2 and went up to almost $100.
His mother, Jessica, says the family is now unable to pay their mortgage.
When Jessica saw that Apple and PayPal had been taking large amounts of money from her account, she knew something was wrong. She made a fraud claim with her bank in July, which told her the charges were probably fraud. In October, however, the bank said that Jessica needed to contact Apple because they were real.
Apple told her that because she called over 60 days after the charges were made, she needed to pay. She hadn't called earlier because of what her bank had initially told her.
Jessica told the New York Post more should be done to stop these types of payments. "My son didn't understand that the money was real," she said. "How could he? He's playing a cartoon game in a world that he knows is not real."
Apple says that customers receive an email when something is bought in a game, and parents can use a feature that sends them notifications when a child wants to buy something using their account.
In 2014, the US Federal Trade Commission told Apple it had to pay back at least $32.5 million to customers whose children had bought things in games without asking them.
