John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesKids do the darndest things! They repeat a swear word that they learned from—uh-oh!—you. They convince their little siblings that they were adopted. They rack up over a thousand dollars worth of charges on iPad games.
Oopsies!
That's what one U.K. father experienced when his 6-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, charged $1587.14 (£979.90) worth of in-app purchases while playing games on his iPad in just two days (H/T Jezebel).
The most shocking revelation in this story is that the twins didn't drop that cash on Candy Crush.
Ashley Griffiths, of St. Ives, Cambridgeshire, and his wife received four pages worth of charges from Apple, for items like virtual pets and clothing, ranging in cost from $4 to $125.
"We started getting emails from Apple," Griffiths recalled to the BBC. "My wife said, 'I don't think you're going to like this. It looks like the kids have been downloading stuff.'"
He continued, "Children don't understand the value of money, they just see it as a way of collecting more pets and clothes for characters in the games."
Griffiths has taken his complaints to Apple and is hoping that they, along with the Office of Fair Trading, will make changes so that it's more difficult for children to make in-game purchases, including asking for credit card information at the time of purchase.
"These games are aimed at children and the designers know exactly what's going to happen. There should be measures in place to prevent this," he explained to The Telegraph.
"I mean, who in their right mind is going to pay [$125] for a virtual pet?"
Apple has refunded the entirety of the bill as a sign of good will because some other kid is probably out there right now, charging hundreds of dollars on his parent's credit card, so who really cares?