Recently a twelve year old boy from the UK racked up a $1400.00 bill (USD equivalency) on his Mom’s credit card purchasing FarmVille farm cash!
There’s nothing wrong with spending some money on virtual goods or farm cash if farming is your thing, but one kid’s FarmVille addiction may have went a little too far and at the cost of his mother. Although some of the money spent on farm cash came from the boy’s own savings, the majority of it was unknowingly billed to his Mom’s credit card. His mother also confirmed that he was well aware of what he was doing when purchasing the farm cash.
He was able to accrue the $1400 FarmVille bill over a period of about two weeks. That is a lot of FV exclusive items and is equivalent to about 8,680 FV$, assuming that he purchased the “Farmer’s Best Value” farm cash option. It is difficult to imagine how he could spend so much farm cash in two weeks, but remember that besides decorations and animals, farm expansions and fuel can also be purchased with farm cash. According to Mashable, both Zynga and his mother’s credit card company were not apt to refunding the charges,
“Neither Zynga or the mother’s credit card company HSBC responded positively to requests for refunds; the latter indicated only a criminal proceeding could trigger eligibility for getting the funds reinstated. A spokeswoman for HSBC indicated that had the expenditures been on a gambling site the escalating transactions would have raised warning flags, but since the purchases were technically Facebook Credits, they didn’t warrant suspicion.” (Source: Mashable )
While both the mother and her FarmVille big spender twelve year old son remain anonymous, his mother had a few things to say,
“The first use of my card was on 14 March. I discovered it on the 29th and the card was stopped at that point. Any transactions after that date were already in the system, so what I thought was a £427 spend turned into £625 over the next few days.”
“The total spend is about £905, but the credits are still rolling in. Facebook and [game creator] Zynga will not refund anything as [the son] lives in my house. Facebook has disabled his account and Zynga has unhelpfully suggested I use password protection on computers in the future.”
On why she did not want to pursue further action with criminal charges which is the only way the credit card company would consider refunding money, “He would be cautioned and I have been told that this caution would stay with him. Obviously the idea of a stupid farm simulation jeopardising his future earnings is not something that I want to consider.”
“When I asked him why he did it he said that they had brought out ‘good stuff that I wanted’.”
(Source: The Guardian)
Suprisingly his mother does not blame Facebook, Zynga, or her credit card company because she believes that her son, fully aware of what he was doing, was the one that made the purchases and thus responsible. Although she does think that they should ”put systems in place to stop this (from) happening again. The fact that he was using a card in a different name should bring up some sort of security and the online secure payment filter seems to be bypassed for Facebook payments.”
She then added that,
“We sound terribly technologically unaware don’t we? I wouldn’t mind but I am always explaining that all of these online offers, ringtones and games are a scam designed to take money off stupid people. Kids know best though.”
What do you think about this?