DS 13 spent £300 on FIFA

[rozzyraspberry]

Anyone else experienced this. DS recently got a paper round and opened a bank account.

Just realised when he got his bank statement in that he spent £300 on FIFA in one day.

He’s devastated - for some reason didn’t link it to spending real money.

We were obviously naive and have now removed his bank account from his account.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Well…he won’t do it again I suppose

It’s a shame he had to learn it the hard way

Well, yes but only for about 30 quid.

At least you've spotted it early and can chat to him and put measures in place so it can't happen again.

I wouldn't bother making him feel worse than he already does. Chalk it up to experience and don't consider punishing.

Unless he has sen then I'd find it hard to believe at 13 that he didn't realise it was real money.

An expensive lesson
How did he not know this at 13?

lesdon learned, at 13 they need an account with parental control tbh.
Especially if they have a wage going in. £300 is a lot at 13.

@rozzyraspberry - it's easily done.

Both my DDs did something similar when they first got bank accounts but not for such a large amount.

They spent £2 here or £3 there on things for the game they were playing and it soon added up. Don't punish him, he probably feels a bit silly and shocked by what he's done. We told DDs to always check their bank account before buying something so they could keep track of their spending.

It's never happened again and now at 15 they're quite savvy with their money.

Think of it as a (very) street learning curve.

These things are awful. It's basically encouraging children to gamble. An expensive lesson but he's remorseful at least.

Well, it's a tough lesson but he won't do it again, will he?

Street =steep

Has this happened to anyone else?

Think it’s a regular occurrence on MN
Most recently a 13 year old racked up £6000 on Fortnite.

@gingerbiscuit19

These things are awful. It's basically encouraging children to gamble. An expensive lesson but he's remorseful at least.

It's not gambling, in Fifa you buy players, and by having better players you are more likely to win the games which makes the experience more enjoyable. Whilst paying to progress has its own issues it is not comparable to gambling and you are buying a tangible thing.

Op there are loads of threads like this, it's a hard lesson, but an important one. For future you don't need to link a card to fifa etc, everything can be purchased using ps or xbox vouchers.

Maybe he did know but its easy to mount up with a £3 pack here or a £5 pack there. Whilst it is a lot of money, per hour played over the year it will probably not work out that expensive, I know MN hates the idea of spending on games but will happily spend money on physical toys.

Log in to his playstation or x box account. Change the password.
Add the option to have to enter the password for each purchase.
No more spending without your authorisation

It's quite common but often because parents have chosen not to use the parental controls when they've set the console up, sometimes because they haven't even taken part in setting up and have just given it to their child to sort and often because parents haven't made sure their child understand about in apps costing cash and chose to also give them unsupervised access to an adults profile (so that the child doesn't have the child restrictions) with a bank account attached and no passwords set or they've even given the child the passwords.

Did you not see all the email reciepts at the time? I get one minutes after dd purchases something

You could try emailing the game company but I'm not sure it can be seen as a mistake as at 13, most will know it's real money being spent as the parents should have made sure if they're giving them a reason to those type of games. It's an expensive lesson for him to learn but if it's own money he's spent then I'd just make sure you make sure he can't do it again and get the parental controls on etc

It's a hard lesson for him to learn, but one that he is likely to remember.
Better to do it now, with his own earnings from hours of delivering papers, than later in life where it could be bigger amounts.

He now knows what it feels like to gamble away hours and hours of earnings.

Thanks for all the responses.

I feel bad because we did have all these parental controls set up for ds1 and ds2 so not sure how we missed it with ds3.

I’m legal guardian for my mother who has advanced dementia and have found the last 6 months particularly stressful as I’ve been dealing with various legal issues. I need to make sure I’m focusing more on ds3 so lesson learnt for me too.

He's devastated, which is actually good. Lesson learnt and it could have been much more than £300. Whatever you do do not feel sorry for him and replace any of the money. The lesson he has learnt the hard way is priceless.

@rozzyraspberry this happened to us for maybe £200-400. I contacted Microsoft I think as it was on an Xbox, and they refunded it all. They did make it very clear that it would only be happening once though!
Give it a go - it’s very common.

@Ifeelmuchlessfat can I ask who you contacted - I’m struggling to find an email address.

Thank you

[quote Ifeelmuchlessfat]@rozzyraspberry this happened to us for maybe £200-400. I contacted Microsoft I think as it was on an Xbox, and they refunded it all. They did make it very clear that it would only be happening once though!
Give it a go - it’s very common.[/quote]
Why would they refund it?

@rozzyraspberry it was about 4 years ago so can’t really remember but I had a google and found this…

@GreyhoundG1rl I can’t say why, company policy perhaps when parents whose children have messed up contact them? It happens, and for the most part it’s in their interests to keep parents happy given the number of years we pay out for. I have found both them and Apple reasonable when things have been bought in error, or subscriptions renewed automatically by mistake.