As long as there are smartphones and tablets, games geared for kids, and kids with enough time on their hands (and creativity) to thwart their parents' security measures, there will always be kids racking up huge charges on their parents' accounts. That's just the nature of the child-parent relationship, we feel.
The latest in the "you spent what on my what" saga comes from West Sussex, England. According to The Metro, Mohamed Shugaa recently found that his seven-year-old son had managed to rack up quite the bill playing the Jurassic World game on his iPad.
While said kid knew his dad's password to get onto the iPad itself, the dad was surprised to learn that his son had also memorized his Apple ID password. And, in doing so, he was able to bypass any restrictions his father had placed on the device and buy whatever he wanted in the game.
The damage? The son made 65 transactions between December 13 and December 18—that's a lot of dinosaurs—to the tune of £4,000, or just around $5,900.
Shugaa is apparently upset that Apple didn't do anything to verify that the many, many purchases made over that small time period were actually him.
"I was so mad. I'm 32 years old, why would Apple think I would be spending thousands of pounds on buying dinosaurs and upgrading a game," he told The Metro.
"Why didn't they email me to check I knew these payments were being made? I got nothing from them. How much longer would it have gone on for?"
In a bit of good news for the dad, Apple has apparently refunded Shugaa his money for his son's purchases. We might also recommend that he go into his iPad and enable Touch ID for all purchases going forward—assuming his iPad has the feature. We highly doubt a kid is going to find a good way to bypass that; if so, sign him or her up for spy training immediately. The dad could also just create a separate iTunes account for his kid, but that'll be annoying to deal with on the same iPad.
We're also a little curious why the dad didn't see all sorts of Apple purchase receipts in his inbox, which would have clued him in about all those transactions. (If you value account security, don't just filter those messages to the trash!)