Kid spends 37,000 EUR on a free to play game

[PhantomChevron]

The devs though, must be super happy

[Recon97]

Why would on earth would a mother give credit card info to her child? It's is obvious that a kid might mess up with the card. Kids shouldn't be give such Liberty.

[Nuluvius]

This is an easy slope to fall down. I myself suffered MMO addiction in my earlier life which destroyed me on just about every level. If I were to calculate the total amount of cash that I have spent on the virtual over the years it would easily fall into the triple digit range. In the time I spent in that very dark place I have watched others do the same around me. I have even encouraged this in others and then subsiquently watched as they destroyed themselves. Combined with strong autistic and obsessive compulsive personality traits this business model can be especially destructive. I recovered by staying away, understanding what my triggers are and keeping myself busy/obsessed with other less destructive things like programming for example.

 

I can recount one specific incident of note: I was spending time in a particular game when lock boxes had literally just been introduced. The leader of the guild I was a member of at the time, like me, was obsessed with needing to own absolutely every item. With the addition of the lock box model and thus the one time only, time limited item model plus lock box keys appearing in its pay2play/pay2win micro transaction model, his destruction was realised. We were up late one night and he kept on spending money from his credit card trying to roll a particular item from the boxes he had amassed (also with cash). After he had spent the first $200 he would say to me "just another couple of $$, I know its really close now". I would tell him that he had clearly gone off the rails and to stop... this did nothing to deter him though because he was fixated at this point. $500 (that he had admitted to) later he had acquired two of the same item he was originally after and was finally satiated.

 

It was on vent the very next day when we were all discussing some unrelated matter that we heard his wife come into the room with him. She began shouting at him, demanding to know what all of the money had been spent on. The row escalated terribly and we all heard him getting slapped/punched around the head and face before he signed off.

 

While I think these business models are inherently evil, I don't think it's necessarily the fault of the companies for exploiting them. At the end of the day they are only utilizing a methodology for generating revenue. Moreover if the consumer demand was not prevalent in that direction then they would ultimately not succeed (given there is also valid argument for the engineering of that demand in the first place). Generally all of this is probably not that dissimilar to the machinations of gambling, drugs, tobacco and alcohol (the latter two being a form of drug).

[Guest]

What the heck was he buying?

[Totally-A-Hero]

I told my Bro he could use my debit card to buy 1 $10 thing of gold on COC, i watched him do it and remove the credit card and the next day there was $150 gone.... we got refunded from COC because "there was a glitch" lol, 46k tho...... wat.

[Nuluvius]

What the heck was he buying?

 

The kid or the guild leader?

[Santa_Dwarf]

My avatar. That's all.

[KungPaoChino]

Wow... All that money thrown away into a game...

[ManOfDisguise]

never even heard of that game LOL

[Legion]

What kind of banks are those that don't send messages to account holders about their account being debited/credited.

 

Pretty much my bank rings me once a month asking me about various transactions. God forbid a man wants to buy sex toys...

(The sad reality is its books for studying Korean and they haven't realised by now those transactions to a korean paypal are legit.)

[DevanArianne]

This was kind of the perfect storm of this kid being just smart enough to fuck over his family and the parents being just a bit ignorant enough to not notice. Let's break this down.

It is not the direct parent's own credit card. She mostly does not have access to the direct account information. If it was her own bank account or credit card that 30,000 Euro disappeared from she would notice

This kid had every idea that he was exchanging actual money for the in game currency, probably didn't realize how much or had a reference point of how much exactly 30,000 euro is.

The grandparent probably had no access to either his grand-son's or his daughters Apple accounts to see that they were even using his credit card.

 

This was the perfect storm of a bit of ignorance on all parts to create a massive fuck-up. I would say the order of blame goes about 70 the child (He knew he was taking money from his grandparents, I don't care what he says.) then 20% on the grandfather (People should notice when 100's of Euro a day go missing) and 10% on the mother, as she had almost no way to track that he son was doing this. I know it's easy to say "Monitor and pay attention to what your kids are doing." But even being in my early 20's myself and quite technologically knowledgeable, if I even watched a kid make an in app purchase in a F2P game that most likely has a free earned currency and a real money one, unless I specifically saw a section asking for credit card information in the 10 minutes that the child was AWARE I was watching, then I would never even know and I highly doubt a lot of the people on this forum would. 

 

Short of actively imposing some kind of secretive surveillance on their child (via a iPhone app or some other monitoring system) there's very little way to be sure in this situation where they had very few tools.

Hopefully they do get a refund, use 20 Euro to buy the kid a Nokia dumbphone and don't ever trust him with credit card info again until he learned the responsibility for his actions.

[SeriouslyMikey]

I would have let this pass and just blamed the parents on this one. But as this is a teenager, I cant help but laugh at his pure stupidity. How can you not realise that you're buying something in an online store? More so, how did the mother or father not realise that they were a little short of cash all of a sudden after their kid's moronic spending spree? Unless the game evilly hides the fact that they are paying for things, then the kid and the parents are completely at fault. The kid for doing it and the parents for being so bone idle for not noticing. 

 

I get slapped for a sneaky £7 film every year, I wonder what this kid got.