There are safeguards to avoid these annoyances, but that doesn’t mean there are still cases of financial disasters caused by in-app purchases on the App Store. And if not, tell Georgina Munday, a mother who had the scare of the year on her iPad.
Georgina, who lives very close to the city of Liverpool and works as a nurse, thought someone might have accessed her bank card when she saw a series of charges totaling £2,500 that she did not make. It wouldn’t have been weird, with all the attempts to Phishing that the two roam at ease these days. But the origin of the problem was in her daughter and in the App Store.
All protections are rare if someone gets the password
What happened was that her ten-year-old daughter, who has autism, managed to change her Apple ID password so she could accept in-app purchases on the iPad from which she was playing Roblox. What followed was a frenzy of in-app purchases averaging around £20 each, ending at around $2,900 of the total.
The mother spent several days talking to both Apple and her bank, to discuss what had happened, seeking to reverse those payments. Apple’s response was that the Airtime parental protections should have been activated and the bank refused to reverse the transactions because the person making the payments was his daughter and not someone with fraudulent intentions.
The solution came when Georgina took the desperate step of talking to the BBC, particularly with the You and Yours program, to get them to air what happened. As soon as it was known, the bank re-examined the situation and within 24 hours the card charge was waived. The relief was such that Georgina even burst into tears at the weight lifted from her shoulders. The economic situation was not at all favorable to this misadventure and it would have been necessary to face a bank loan to be able to assume these nearly 3,000 dollars.
Apple was contacted by the BBC and one of their spokespersons made it clear that if you leave a device for your child to play with, you must use additional protections such as Face ID to authorize the purchase and in no way let him know any of the passwords of the device. Now Georgina has already assured that she will no longer let her daughter play unsupervised as has happened so far.
For those of you who have your sons or daughters playing Roblox, know that the game also has the ability to apply its own parental controls.
Imagen | Emily Wade
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