Guardian article
£7.99 is hardly a small payment, and surely these games have some kind of system in place to stop tapping over and over to take out payment after payment?
Stories like this seem to pop up more and more now, the people running these stores need better systems in place, £3,000 is insane, that is the kind of money I spend on games over a decade
Its every parents nightmare. An 11-year-old from Stockport has run up a £3,000 bill sending his mother hugely overdrawn after using Google Play to try to buy credits for his favourite online games.
Like thousands of other parents, Penny Wrinch handed over her debit card details to allow her highly trustworthy and technically savvy son Nick to buy games for the family Google Nexus tablet. But she has since been left regretting the move after her bank account was emptied in just a short space of time.
Nick used Googles Play Store to buy apps and in-app credits to enable him to play various games. For several months his purchases went without a hitch, with him spending just a few pounds here and there all agreed by his mother. But at some point hundreds of payments left her account over a period of just a few days. Fearing that hackers had got access to her bank account, Penny even cancelled her cards.
In fact Nick had simply been trying and seemingly failing to buy credits to play football management game Top Eleven 2015 and strategy game Clash of Clans among others. Rather than the expected small number of payments of between £1.49 and £7.99 going out of Pennys account, it would appear that after making a purchase the credits never reached Nick, causing him to click and click in vain to make them appear.
On 2 March alone, 21 payments of £3.99 and a further nine of £1.49 disappeared from Pennys account. The next day Nick tried again to buy the credits and the same thing happened with 18 payments being made to Google. A week later 27 payments of between £2.99 and £6.99 were all debited.
In total, Penny says £3,000 was paid to Google Play over a two-month period, causing her huge financial difficulties. The whole thing has been a nightmare. Payments bounced, including my credit card bill, and I have incurred bank charges as a result. Nick knows that these credits are bought, and are not free, but we suspect that when nothing happened he kept clicking buy, completely unaware that the money was leaving my account. I cant believe that Google dont have processes in place to stop this happening, Penny says.
Assuming that Play Store would realise the error and rectify it, Nicks grandfather Tom contacted Google, only to be told the payments were correct and nothing could be done. Instead of the refund he says he was simply invited to think happy thoughts.
£7.99 is hardly a small payment, and surely these games have some kind of system in place to stop tapping over and over to take out payment after payment?
Stories like this seem to pop up more and more now, the people running these stores need better systems in place, £3,000 is insane, that is the kind of money I spend on games over a decade