GoHenry card - cautionary tale - my son spent £4,000 over less than 3 months

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I got my 11 year old a GoHenry card a year or so ago to get him to understand how to earn money by setting him chores which would get remunerated from his account on which I had put some pocket money and how to save. My 11 year old ended up spending just short of GBP4,000 over 3 months on online gaming sites using his GoHenry card. I did not even know this was even possible. They did nothing to alert me. They say on their website that you can set spending limits and get notifications in real time. I did not realise this was happening as auto top up from my account was on and notifications were off. I was not even aware of those functions as they are not well advertised. I was made to think by their own advertising that this card was just a pocket money card, not a debit or credit card. I think the marketing and advertising of this company is misleading. They have refused all responsibility for what has happened as they said that it was up to parents to enable/disable those functions on the app and some kids do spend vast amounts on online gaming and therefore this triggered no alerts on their system. I feel a duty to warn other parents that this is a risk for children who do fall into these gaming website traps that a GoHenry card can easily be misused.

DS has one of these cards and every time he spends anything I get a notification, its one of the reasons why we chose it.
If your son has done this OP then its on you I am afraid

Sadly it's not easy for everyone to see as we're all different but I thought the thing looked dodgy the moment I saw the start of the advert. I looked up 'gohenry is disgusting' and this thread was the first link. That's absolutely awful that they set the default as no spending limit and no notifications and don't warn you. The default should be both those things on unless you choose to turn them off, or it should be a question during sign-up. I'm so sorry you lost so much money.

Frankly, I don't believe the card should be allowed to exist. There's a reason that, for years, only over-18s could have debit or credit cards. Even then, the advertising used to be sketchy as it claimed you couldn't spend what you didn't have (debit cards) but more than once, I checked my balance, spent something, and went overdrawn as what was displayed was not the available balance because of the way the system worked.

I knew someone once who was under 18 and got a credit card - this was many years ago - and when they wanted him to pay money back, they couldn't enforce it because he was under 18 and they shouldn't have given him the card in the first place. But now kids can just randomly get something that calls itself a debit card but is really a credit card linked to the parent's account (thereby "borrowing" money from the parents, 4 grand in this case)?!

This sounds like a worse version of an actual prepaid debit card. The standard normal prepaid cards only allow you to spend what has literally been topped up on the card. So if you top up £10, you can only spend £10 - if that runs out, you can't spend a penny more as the money is connected to the card, not someone else's bank account. With a normal prepaid card, the only way someone can spent thousands on gaming sites is if someone actively tops up the card with thousands of pounds.

that insane… as my debit card would have been rejected once it got to £0… my bank calls me too if I spend a lot of money to make sure it’s me and not fraud

That's insane. As an adult, if I try to spend anything near that amount from my own account, my bank sends an alert to my phone or/and won't let me spend it until further checks have been done. A normal prepaid debit card (not gohenry, which just sounds like a worse version of a normal prepaid debit card) would only allow 4 grand to be spent if 4 grand was actively topped up onto the card, as normal prepaid debit cards are not linked to someone's bank account. gohenry sounds like it's basically a credit card - only instead of getting the money from some big bank with plenty of money in reserve, the card holder, who has little knowledge of money, is taking it from some vulnerable parent's account.

I would contact the financial ombudsman

Well that’s his Christmas gifts sorted then!
he knew he was buying stuff and it was being funded by you. He knew this was wrong.

The person at fault is your DS!