Colleague at work's 8-year old son ran up a credit card bill for eight thousand quid in one month buying gold and stuff in an online children's game. Was playing on dad's iPad which had (password-protected) credit card payment details stored on it, in-app purchases auto-filled in payment details, needed password but kid has seen dad entering this and remembered it, entered it once and off he went. Of course he didn't think it was "real" money he was spending, he thought it was pretend money.
Cue explosion when credit card bill arrived. He managed to get the money refunded by arguing with the online game firm that there's no way they should have allowed a young child to run up a bill of this size, at least without confirming the spend was authorized by the card holder.
Yes you could say this was the fault of the parent for storing card details on a device that he allowed his son to play online games on, but as far as he was concerned payments were password-protected. For sure the online gaming company is more to blame for having a game targeted at children which allowed -- no, encouraged -- them to spend real money on in-app purchases. And the biggest blame goes to them for not having a system which flagged ridiculously high spends as likely to be fraudulent or at best unauthorized, which I guess is why they paid up -- if it had come to court they wouldn't have had a leg to stand on.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
