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We read about the horror stories of ‘in game' charges on a fairly regular basis and the latest hit the web this weekend – a 43 year old father was facing a £4,000 charge after his daughter racked up a series of fees.
His eight year old daughter purchased from ‘free' games from the Apple App Store including Campus Life, My Horse, Hay Day and Smurf's Village. According to the Sun newspaper she charged up to £2,000 in six days over 74 transactions. She didn't realise she was using her fathers real money to buy the in game extras.
Lee Neale, 43 an Aerospace engineer only found out when the bank froze his account. He was working away from home and missed a series of emails which alerted him to his daughter buying in game items. Lily spent more than £4,000 between March and July.
Apple initially refused to help Lee saying ‘all purchases made on the iTunes Store are final'. Later on the firm changed their mind and Lee got his money back.
Lee said Apple ‘really saved his bacon.' He chatted to The Sun about his daughter ‘She is only eight years old. Even when I sat her down and explained that what she was doing had cost dad money, I still don’t think she really understood.'
It raises a good point however, are these in game purchases not made clear enough to parents and young children? Should young children even have access to a parents account to buy items? We know that the Apple iPad will request a password for purchases, so the child would need to already know the password to do this.
Kitguru says: Let us know what you think, is is about time that Apple, Samsung and other companies stepped in to put a halt to these ‘free' game in app charges?
As this isn’t the first and won’t be the last, in game charges should IMO be banned.
Google has been combatting some of them with the need to enter password again so in theory if your kid has an Android tablet but you set up the account there, they won’t be able to buy anything as they won’t know the password and/or the CC details. If in this case iTunes had asked or the CC details or even CVV again then maybe the kid wouldn’t have been able to rack up the bill.
So not only should the blame be pointed towards developers but also the iTunes thing and Google Play store. If the in game charges are here to stay then surely these shops must have similar sort of limits in place as casinos do. Apple can’t claim with a straight face that this kind of spending behaviour is typical and what constitutes as normal.
I’m glad Apple forgave the behaviour, another alternative would have been to dispute the charges as it wasn’t the CC owner who made the purchases and in that area customer is always right.
If in-game purchases were banned a good amount of games would no longer be free and everyone would lose out because of a minority of people.
Whenever you see these stories it’s always an Apple device which you are required to enter card details into. Now with Android you don’t need to enter your card details to download free apps and those with card details in can require the account password before a purchase is made.
Regardless, the problem is that kids of such an age that don’t know what they’re doing are given this technology and are left unsupervised because it keeps them quiet. Yes they’re quiet but they don’t really know that buying whatever item that makes their game better is going to charge you, instead of banning these in-game purchases why aren’t people telling Apple that they need to make the way they handle the purchases more child proof, requiring a password is good enough to stop a child. Unless you’ve told them your password in which case you deserve to have your money spent on premium currencies.
In-app purchases can be disabled under restriction in iOS. I’m not sure about Android. I think it’s just a result of uneducated users. No ban required.
One way around this is to surely only use ITunes cards so that you are unable to go over what is already on the device?
It would seem silly to ban them completely, a lot of businesses rely on these micro transactions to operate. However measures could be put in place to prevent stories like this, such as automated lock on purchases after a set amount (set by owner of device, maybe £10 or so) that then automatically sends an email to unlock IAP again.
Redeem Cards for the win lol
I don’t think they should be banned, just a bit more security put onto it. For instance, I always have a password that I have to enter before I make any in app purchases, if the man in this story had told his daughter the password then it’s more or less his own fault.
I do however think there should be more security put on this kind of thing, like a £10 limit or whatever, or something where you can limit where you spend the money.