A story that is far from an isolated case, because many parents undoubtedly also make this error.
There is nothing worse for a parent than discovering that his child had ripped or stealing money. When it happens, any father or mother feels a mixture of anger, guilt and misunderstanding. In general, they wonder “How could it happen?“To their so young child. And yet, nowadays, children and adolescents have become an easy target, especially on the internet. They surf, play, chat on apparently harmless sites or applications. But behind these colorful and familiar interfaces, are sometimes hiding well -established traps.
A father paid the price and told his story to the British media The Guardian. Today, it has become common to have your bank card directly recorded on your smartphone. It is practical, fast, and it allows you to make purchases in a few clicks or to subscribe to a mobile application. By force, we even forget that our bank card is one with our phone. Is it trivial? Not really … One day, the father had the unpleasant surprise to receive an invoice of more than $ 8,500, which makes around 10,000 euros, associated with his Apple Store account.
He quickly understood that it came from his daughter, 8 years old. “In barely three months, she spent all this money on the App Store to send money to youtubeurs. She did not know that the money she spent was real money,” he explained to our colleagues. These content creators then approached him on Roblox, an online game platform, to try to extract even more. The debit card used to make 270 payments in total was that of parents, mistakenly linked to their child’s iPhone. During all these weeks, neither the HSBC nor Apple bank reacted to these unusual transactions. But then what to do?
To prevent this from happening at home, parents have every interest in checking their child’s phone and activating an option. On iPhone, just create an Apple identifier to him via family sharing, instead of letting it use yours or creating one in its corner. This automatically activates the function “Request purchase authorization”. Result: each attempt to download or purchase, you receive an alert and must validate. Practical to avoid unpleasant surprises on your bank account!
