Age 6 Boy Racks Up Astronomical Debt on Mom's Credit Card While Playing Video Games
A 6-year-old boy’s video game habit is going to cost his mother more than $16,000.
The charges came after young George Johnson began using his mom’s iPad in July to buy add-ons at the Apple store for the video game Sonic Forces. His purchases allowed him to add characters and increase his speed in the game.
As time went on, the purchases grew costlier and the bill soared higher.
“It’s like my 6-year-old was doing lines of cocaine — and doing bigger and bigger hits,” real estate broker Jessica Johnson, 41, of Wilton, Connecticut, told the New York Post.
On one July day, for example, while mom was working from home, her son had 25 charges on her credit card, totaling more than $2,500.
He first reaction when she saw Apple and PayPal charging her Chase account was that it was either a mistake or some kind of fraud. She said a lack of itemized charges hid what was taking place under her nose.
This 6-year-old racked up $16K on mom’s credit card playing video games https://t.co/BXQy39XaZy pic.twitter.com/17hk1J9mwK
— New York Post (@nypost) December 12, 2020
When the bill hit, she filed a fraud claim, only to be told by Chase three months later that the charges were valid. Her next stop was to deal with Apple, who took her through a “buried running list of all the charges. You wouldn’t know how to [find] it without someone directing you.”
Then she saw the icon for the game and knew her son had been shopping. She said Apple was no help to her.
“[Apple] said, ‘Tough.’ They told me that, because I didn’t call within 60 days of the charges, that they can’t do anything,” Johnson said. “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.”
Even saying that the bill would make it hard to pay the mortgage did not get a helpful reaction, she said.
“They’re like, ‘There’s a setting, you should have known,’” she said, adding that she did not know about preventive settings on her account. “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.”
Johnson said games such as the one that her son played “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?”
Further, Johnson said, she blames Apple.
“My son didn’t understand that the money was 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.
Apple did not comment to the Post about the incident.
The child offered a remedy when confronted with what he had done.
“He said, ‘Well, I’ll pay you back, Mom,’” she said. “How? I pay him $4 to clean his room! I literally told George, ‘I don’t know about Christmas.’”
Johnson, who works on commission, said that due to the impact of COVID-19 on home sales, “I didn’t get a paycheck from March to September. … My income has decreased by 80 percent this year.”
“I may have to force this kid to pay me back in 15 years when he gets his first job,” she said,
Johnson had a word of warning for parents: “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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