> While the girl said she didn't understand much about money or where it came from, she knew to delete chat records and payment transactions to hide evidence of her spending from her parents.<p>I do see this as a complete parenting failure. Given she had such access that she can not only spend $64k, but also spend without daily / weekly / monthly limits, and also have access to chat logs (on her parents' phone ig?) and somehow was able to delete transactions (???) -- makes all that kind of the fault of the parents.<p>Locking down a phone is not hard, even for mostly tech-illiterate people. It's a feature built into e.g. iPhones. This includes the parents having to manually authorize payments, app installations, and so on. This is a feature that has existed for a long time.<p>Further, did the parents not notice her daughter looking at her phone so much? According to the article:<p>> a teacher called to say she thought the girl might be addicted to mobile games after noticing how much time the 13-year-old spent on her phone<p>Maybe these parents are just busy, or maybe this is the lesson they needed to learn that a phone isnt a replacement parent. But it's also likely that they're raising an "ipad kid", where the phone & games are used to shut the child up so the parents dont have to put in any effort.
I'm extremely reluctant to let my kids spend money on in-app purchases, and I'm extremely reluctant to do it myself. My youngest is currently begging for Robux, but he can't explain what he wants to spend them on. My oldest has his own allowance that he's free to spend how he likes, and a lot of it is going to purchasing various games, but the amount he can spend is very limited and he seems to be pretty careful about what he spends it on. I think a shared hosted Minecraft server with some friends is his latest expenditure, and I guess that makes sense.<p>Years ago, I did discover that one of my kids had done some in-app purchases coming from my credit card which I never authorized. I immediately reverted it, and complained to Google that unauthorized purchases should not be possible. It's utterly ridiculous that it was possible back then. I hope they fixed that. Payments should always require explicit authorization from me to my bank.
Parents fault. credit cards and bank accounts have alerts. Who doesn't check their account's multiple times per week? Even more so if you give your child Free reign
I don't understand why we as a society allow such ridiculous amounts of money to be asked for in mobile phone app. The first political entity that wants to ban microtransactions has my vote.