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Dad believes 17-year-old son didn’t know about his $8,000 in-game purchases

By Ng Chong Seng - on 15 Jan 2016, 11:41am

Dad believes 17-year-old son didn’t know about his $8,000 in-game purchases

A father in Ontario, Canada had the shock of his life when he received a credit card bill before Christmas amounting to $7,625.88 (Canadian dollars). Apparently, the charges were for in-game purchases (FIFA football games, in case you’re wondering) that his son made on his Xbox.

The thing is, this isn’t another case of a kid memorizing the parent’s password to make in-app purchases. Because here we’re talking about a 17-year-old son using the credit card his father gave him for “emergencies or to make purchases for the family’s convenience store.”

But it gets weirder. Good dad Mr. Lance Perkins said his son was also shocked of the amount.

Via CBC News:

“He thought it was a one-time fee for the game,” Perkins said.

“He’s just as sick as I am, [because] he never believed he was being charged for every transaction, or every time he went onto the game.”

According to the report, Mr. Perkins contacted both the credit card company and Microsoft. The former said it couldn’t go anything unless he wanted to have his son charged with fraud; the latter basically said the bill would stand.

So it looks like Mr. Perkins didn't manage to get the charges cancelled. To ensure such incidents won’t ever happen again, he has decided to ban the Xbox (or any other game console) in his home. Well, who can blame him? In fact for many people, that's often the easiest solution than to learn about the parental controls on a modern day device.

Still. Wow.

Source: CBC News.

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