A kid in Connecticut may have landed on Santa’s naughty list after a spending spree on his mom’s iPad.Jessica Johnsonhad no idea what her six-year-old,George, was up to while playing on her tablet, until her credit card bill arrived. It seems the tyke was racking up charges in his favorite video game, Sonic Forces, buying add-on boosters that gave him access to new characters and more speed. And when his clueless mom got a bill for $16,293.10? She actually thought it was fraud and filed a claim.
Back in July, George started buying add-ons that were $1.99, then moved on to those that were $99.99 and when the Apple app-store and PayPal charges came in, they were for hundreds of dollars each. “It’s like my six-year-old was doing lines of cocaine—and doing bigger and bigger hits,” Johnson jokes. She assumed the unitemized charges were a mistake or fraud and called her bank, Chase. After filing a fraud claim in July, she heard nothing until October, when Chase told her that those were her charges and to contact Apple.
But Apple was no help, telling her because she didn’t call within 60 days of the charges, they can’t do anything. They also told her there’s a setting to prevent this kind of spending on her account, but she didn’t know it existed. And while she’s upset with her son for the spending, he didn’t have a clue what he was doing, so Johnson puts the blame on Apple. “He’s playing a cartoon game in a world that he knows is not real,” she explains. Why would the money be real to him? That would require a big cognitive leap.” And now she’s scrambling to pay for it in a year when her income is down by 80%.
Source:New York Post