Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill
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Re: Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill
#2> But he says he's amazed that in a game designed to be played by children it would even be possible to spend thousands of pounds across a thousand transactions over the course of just a few weeks.
These games are designed around this. The dark patterns are intentional.
> "We encourage parents to review their payment settings on third-party services, such as Google Play, as they typically have an option to require a password for each purchase made and/or to prevent any information from being saved in browser settings that could allow them to be reused."
Then you blame the parents for being scammed.
Re: Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill
#3It’s not the app stores fault, but I think the App Store could start throwing up notifications if you go from spending 0 to 500 in a small period of time.
That is crazy how the girl managed to spend THAT much in a period of a month.
Re: Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill
#4Do the app developers or store have any legal ground to stand on when charges are being made by an unauthorized minor?
Re: Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill
#5Do the app developers or store have any legal ground to stand on when charges are being made by an unauthorized minor?
That no damage was done since they refunded the charges (or rather, that they have already granted the relief that would be sought in a hypothetical lawsuit case).
They can do that do this because it doesn't actually cost them anything to provide the digital "goods" that are being purchased; and not every parent notices. Their defense in the cases where the parent doesn't notice is that the plaintiff must be be aware they were wronged in order to file suit.
Re: Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill
#6Dad can provide a minor credit card/debit card, they are very popular these days with spend limit. Many platforms allow you to set spend limit.
It's also possible to turn on a heater and forget to turn it off by a minor and accure mega electricity bill and same is true if your data is being charged per unit data consumed by your internet provider. In none of those cases, refund would be provided.
Re: Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill
#7Maybe require all apps to have a built in spending limit and an affirmative act per app to raise it with a mandatory password prompt and click on an emailed link to verify.
Make it up to $50 one time or greater than $100 in one calendar month. Given how people actually spend 99% of people will never see such a prompt and virtually everyone that hits it will be one of these people who is being scammed out of their money inadvertently by their kids.
While we are at it we could simply ban all games designed to appeal to the scratch ticket mentality and nothing of value will have been lost.
Re: Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill
#8Dad can provide a minor credit card/debit card, they are very popular these days with spend limit. Many platforms allow you to set spend limit. It's also possible to turn on a heater and forget to turn it off by a minor and accure mega electricity bill and same is true if your data is being charged per unit data consumed by your internet provider. In none of those cases, refund would be provided.
Typically if it is accidental and a one off you do get a refund on those in my experience. Utilities all have bill shock policies.
Re: Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill
#9Dad can provide a minor credit card/debit card, they are very popular these days with spend limit. Many platforms allow you to set spend limit. It's also possible to turn on a heater and forget to turn it off by a minor and accure mega electricity bill and same is true if your data is being charged per unit data consumed by your internet provider. In none of those cases, refund would be provided.
I’m pretty sure I couldn’t spend 5000 dollars by leaving my heating on the wrong setting for a month, unless the heater was set to turn my house to plasma... In the case of data plans, I don’t think the default should be to allow people to spend exorbitant amounts of money on overage fees without at least letting them know what’s going on. I knew a person who ended up with a 10k phone bill a few years ago roaming because they didn’t understand how roaming data costs worked. It’s obviously a dark pattern, and should require a certain level of opt in.
Re: Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill
#10Dad can provide a minor credit card/debit card, they are very popular these days with spend limit. Many platforms allow you to set spend limit. It's also possible to turn on a heater and forget to turn it off by a minor and accure mega electricity bill and same is true if your data is being charged per unit data consumed by your internet provider. In none of those cases, refund would be provided.
Typically if it is accidental and a one off you do get a refund on those in my experience. Utilities all have bill shock policies.
> Typically if it is accidental and a one off you do get a refund on those in my experience. Utilities all have bill shock policies.
Sure, but the real money comes from the non-shocking (while still exorbitant) bills.
I mean, let's say that you sign up your card for your daughter, expecting to be billed once 4.99.
Next month you discover you were billed 49.99 instead, as after the initial 4.99 there are another 9 similar bills, one very three days or so.
My guess is that you would call it a (modest) one-time loss, cancel whatever can be canceled, learn your lesson and get along.
But there will be hundreds, thousands of dads falling in the same trap (as it is a trap) that will do the same.
Anecdata (reversed), my mom a few years ago needed to get some hearing aids, they are a fairly recent model that can connect to the phone via bluetooth. Her phone at the time was not a smartphone, so we bought a new smartphone with the right bluetooth release/version.
She had a pre-paid contract with a very low fee for calls but an exorbitant one for internet connection, to make it short, she usually got along with 50 Euros every two month or so.
Surely it was an overlook by the telephone guys and by myself to not check the (several year old) contract at the light of the possible internet activity on the new phone.
Needless to say, in two day she was out of credit, no problem, we made a new contract, for more or less the same monthy fee with a free 2 or 4 GB internet traffic allotment, and went away with a net loss of some 25/30 Euro.