Looks like Santa won't be visiting his household this Christmas!
A mum was left stunned after her 6-year-old son secretly racked up $22,500 in Apple app store charges after purchasing add ons in his face game, Sonic Forces.
While working from home, Connecticut woman Jessica Johnson had no idea her two sons had gone on a shopping spree on her iPad.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, young George had purchased add-on boosters - starting around $2 for red rings, before moving up to $99.99 gold rings.
His regular purchases then allowed him to access more areas of the game, including new characters and more speed, spending hundreds of dollars in add-ons at a time.
"The way the charges get bundled made it almost impossible [to figure out that] they were from a game," she told the New York Post.
"It's like my 6-year-old was doing lines of cocaine — and doing bigger and bigger hits," she joked of her first-grader.
As the month rolled on, she soon discovered her bill had reached US$16,000 (NZ$22,500).
She filed a fraud claim but it wasn't until October that she was told the charges were in fact hers and she needed to contact Apple.
She realised it was George only when she reached out to Apple and was walked through a buried running list of all the charges.
"You wouldn't know how to [find] it without someone directing you," Jessica said. When she saw the Sonic icon, she knew it was George.
"[Apple] said, 'Tough.' They told me that, because I didn't call within 60 days of the charges, that they can't do anything," said Jessica. "The reason I didn't call within 60 days is because the bank told me it was likely fraud — that PayPal and Apple.com are top fraud charges."
She told the companies she would have to remortgage her house to pay the fee, but received little sympathy from them, saying she should have known about the in-app purchase settings.
When Johnson explained to George what he had done, he said, "Well, I'll pay you back, Mum."
"How?", Johnson responded. "I pay him $4 to clean his room! I literally told George, 'I don't know about Christmas.' "
Johnson says she is scrambling to pay off her debt, which has been made harder after not receiving a pay cheque between March and September because of Covid-19.
She has warned other parents to check their security settings and says it's shocking it's even possible to rack up so many purchases.
