It's not a new story, but both my brother in Australia and I have been hit by big bills from kids making in-app purchases on tablet games.

My brother let his 7-year-old daughter use his ipad and only realised what she had been doing when his Apple Store bill came through: $1000Aus...
After hyperventilating for a bit, he contacted Apple and they refunded the money.

Last Sunday, I tried to pay for diesel with my debit card and it was declined. Not the first time, as the Co-op bank are quick to block the card if there's any odd spending (such as someone maybe buying things while visiting their kids in France...). On calling the bank, they said that there were 43 outstanding transactions waiting to be processed on the account to a value of £450. Most of these, they said, were Google Play sourced mobile games and associated in-app purchases.

At this point, we had to try to establish whether it was one of our lovely offspring or some other thieving rotter. When we bought the tablets for the kids at Christmas, we had to set each of them up with a Google Play account associated with a credit card. We did this, assuming that (like with the Apple account) that a password would be needed to download anything that wasn't free. Well, it isn't.

Turns out my charming 11-year-old had been addicted to The Simpsons Tapped Out, Iron Man 3 and a variety of other games. A week ago, my stepdaughter saw his Simpsons game and told us that he appeared to have loads of extras. He explained that he had "found a 'cheat'" and when she looked again later it had all disappeared.
He's a very smart and cunning kid, who clearly knew what he was doing was wrong and tried to cover his tracks. I suspect he tried clicking on "buy" and when it worked was too excited to think through the consequences... It's one thing to be an innocent child, but in my view a little harder to claim that in these circumstances, tempting though it must have been.

Anyway, having confronted him with his Google Wallet purchase history, he was uncharacteristically tongue-tied. His tablet has been confiscated and we are now thinking up a fitting punishment. I have to say, I am still very angry and a bit frustrated that I haven't been able to give him a quick blast of the "Fergie hairdryer", but his mum doesn't do things that way, so my suppressed ire will have to escape in other ways. Watch out cat. Or Nicky Campbell.

The next issue was recovering the money, which is partly why we haven't punished the little tyke - is it punishment alone or debt recovery too? The total attributable to him is around £200 (the other transactions were legit) and we set about trying to contact someone at Google to find out our position. It's a bit like trying to phone "the Internet" to complain, but I eventually found a number by (ironically) googling "Contact number for Google".
I spoke to 2 people, the first of whom only spoke to me by cutting off his previous caller and was clearly stoned. The second sounded more like she'd overdosed on Red Bull, exclaiming "AWESOME!" at every opportunity, like when I gave her my name. However, the main point is that without any further questioning or quibbling she immediately offered to refund all the purchases from my stepson's account and confirmed it with an email to that effect.
It will take up to 14 days, but if it happens, I think it proves that someone in Google's PR team has realised that this could hurt them very badly if they appear to be exploiting the situation.

Anyway, lessons learned all round, principally: Check your little darlings don't have access to a 1-click app-store!

Yikes. Glad you got it sorted. I suppose doing the dishes for the next year wouldn't harm the lad eh?

I have admit I'm terrified of what my daughter might get up to when she's older. At only 20 months she knows how to navigate her way around an ipad/iphone

I knwo what you mean Nobby, my 3 year old is killer on an iphone, any android device I have doesn't have a card allocated to it so no risk of wrong click and having lots of coinage on a game but none in real life!

Good write up Jim! Glad to hear you got it sorted!

For those out there here is a good link to explain how to lockdown these features

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Got-kids-...s-Phone_id38567

I saw a similar thing on the news the other day. A 11 year old had run up £1500+ on his dads credit card, when the dad was asked why his account wasn't password pretected he couldn't answer.

So why didn't you put a password on the account?

My 7 and 4 yyear old play on my iPad all the time and I've not had a single transaction I didn't know about !!

We didn't put an additional password on because we didn't realise that the original password wouldn't be required each time (as it is on the ipad). I'm sure we could look back and realise we had not un-ticked the "rape my credit card" box on page 45 of the 90-page agreement, but at the time we didn't think it would be so insecure. (We also foolishly thought our kids were old enough to understand the word "disembowel").

Our failure to secure the account is one of the main reasons why we didn't expect to get the money back so easily, yet the fact that we did indicates we are by far from the only idiots out there.

Wait until she goes out?

Well, it's a thought, but I'm not sure that it would be helpful in the long run. I'm quite enjoying this marriage...

SO Jim, what sort of Porn do you get for the remaining £250 or as you put it "legit transactions"

Sadly, bockers, unless you class children's shoes, clothes and groceries from Morrisons as porn (and I suspect the constabulary , or at least the neighbourhood vigilantes would take a dim view), then our card is a porn-free zone. Now if the other (14-year-old) stepson had figured out this blag, I doubt I could make that assertion...

Who in there right mind wouldn't for porn?? It's all free these days isn't it? Although the risks of a virtual disease does run quite high.

Awesome

Sorry could not resit