UK Boy Leaves Family With £2000 iTunes Bill
Talk about bill shock.
A family in the United Kingdom was shocked to receive a massive iTunes bill after their six-year-old grandson went on an in-app buying spree. The Telegraph reports that Will had been playing Monster Island on his grandfather's iPad and, unbeknownst to the iPad's owner, had been making tons of purchases for virtual food and coins.
Speaking to the Daily Mirror, Will's grandfather Barry Smith explained that his grandson was just pressing buttons and buying baskets of food and coins for his monsters. While he did admit that he 'must have synced [his] credit card up with the App Store,' he said he couldn't believe how easy it is to make in-app purchases.
Luckily, this story has a happy ending, at least on the financial side. Will's grandparents, who noticed the mistake when his grandmother's credit card was declined at the supermarket, said they explained the situation to Apple and the company gave them a refund. Sadly, things didn't work out so well for Will. His mother said he was sad when he was told he couldn't play the game anymore because he was about to reach level 26 and fight the Dark Monster.
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was this game developed by Pierce's dad from community?
when you do an in-app purchase there is a window that pops up asking you "CONFIRM YOUR IN-APP PURCHASE do you want to buy xxxxx for $x.xx?" and you need to input the password at least one time then you can buy all you want whitin a few minutes without typing the password again. so either they gave the password to the kid or they where typing the password for him.
Oh...but he would after this ...I guarantee it.
Sorry, but no.
Children can comprehend the consequences of their actions if they are exposed to such education from the get go and not cuddled into the mentality 'oh kids are too young to learn this'.
That's just a simple cop-out.
They are human beings like everyone else... so if you want them to understand something, TEACH them.
Same thing with adults.
A human adult wouldn't be able to comprehend the consequences of his/her actions if they were never taught them in the first place.
On the flip side of things - this IS the grandparents fault for syncing up the credit card in the first place, and not checking in regards if the game will require purchases or not.
Apple is a different beast though.
Their applications and games do have a tendency to 'quietly' charge various purchases if you synced up your credit card.
There's a lesson to be learned here:
Educate yourselves on what the heck you are doing on the device.
If you will give a child the device to play with, educate them on how to use the thing in the first place to AVOID this sort of stupidity in the future/first place.
Thinking that children are 'too young' to learn is an idiotic nonsense.
WHAT? False.
I bet you don't even have an iTunes account. Comments like this are what people hear and then form an opinion of something based in somebody else's false comment.
Just like when people say you don't own the music you buy in iTunes. Guess what I can burn it in a cd and rip it in any othe program or computer.
What do you do when you get bored with of the 7 games and media that are still available this way?
The price should be clearly listed on the store page.
Single price: $4.99
Single price plus recurring: $0.99 + recurring for vitrual goods or recurring for subscription.
and the consumer should be able to set a cap on the recurring fee. People just don't have infinite money and most of us have to live on a budget.
I think the onus is on Apple and Google to figure out how to stop this kind of thing. I've heard of half a dozen identical cases over the last couple years, and there are probably more.
If in-app purchases required you to enter a password, we'd never hear about this again. I think a tiny inconvenience is totally acceptable to fix the problem once and for all.
I have seen some games targeted at kids where they will charge like $20 for some virtual food, and that is a single player offline game, how many berries your character eats has 100% no effect on the company that made the games.
Those parents should have removed the credit card info, then handed the kid a computer and a hex editor and tell him to make more food instead of buying it.