An 8-year-old girl accidentally spent her grandparent’s money on a game, leaving the elderly couple shocked when they found out that $3.
8K (£3,000) had disappeared from their bank account.
Jim and Liz Harrison from Scotland initially thought that their bank account had been hacked after a huge chunk of money had gone missing.
However, they eventually found out what exactly happened – their mischievous granddaughter had been buying items in the Roblox game during lockdown.
The elderly couple have slammed Roblox for making it easy for kids to make purchases without getting permission from devices’ owners.
They said that they allowed their granddaughter Abby to play the game as it was popular amongst children but when they checked their account online, they thought they had been hacked.
Roblox, which has 100 million players around the world, lets users build their own games and encourages them to make in-game purchases.
In an interview with The Daily Record, 67-year-old Liz said that her granddaughter had been spending up to £500 on the game.
“We got a huge shock when we saw the amount that had gone from our account – we initially feared we’d been the victims of scammers.
“It was only when we looked into the payments in detail that we saw lots of different and unusual amounts going out.”
Liz continued: “We spotted they were all to Roblox and asked Abby – she’s only young and had no idea what’s going on and said she’d kept buying things to use in the games.
“She didn’t realise the money was real and we didn’t realise the money was being spent until we set up online banking for the first time a few weeks ago.
“We would have paid far closer attention to what she was doing if we’d thought we’d potentially be paying for things.
“We can’t understand why we weren’t alerted to payments being made – surely Roblox would have checked for authorisation before taking all our money.
“It left us with nothing.”
A spokesperson for the game said: “We strive to prevent unauthorised purchases by taking measures such as not storing full billing information on the platform and work directly with guardians and parents to provide appropriate refunds whenever possible, as we are doing in this case.
“We are in contact with the customer to establish the necessary information for processing the refund.”
The grandparents are now seeking help through Citizen’s advice and have spoken with their bank and Roblox.
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Replaced!