Mobile games are usually a very common way of entertainment for the little ones. It is enough to come up with a simple game, with many colors and many sounds so that more than one tadpole is enthralled playing, but in these times, there is an element that must be taken into account, and it is none other than the in-app payments.
Thousands of euros spent by a child
Many games require you to receive small payments for abilities, tokens to continue the game or simple decorative outfits, and in the end it all translates into a card payment requiring adult attention. This step, quite controlled on iOS and Android, seems to have caused quite a few problems for Facebook users a few years ago, since they played many of the games integrated into the social network, they found more than one surprise in the form of large amounts of money paid.
Many of these cases involving parents who felt cheated reached trial, and now, a company in charge of revealing old archived cases that may be of public interest (Reveal), is in charge of shedding light on all these demands to prove that Facebook acted in bad faith with the majority of those affected.
The file with all the related documents will be released in a few days after obtaining the approval of a federal court, but in the meantime, they have managed to publish some pages of the file in which you can see some examples like the following.
It all goes back to the year 2012, when a child who answers to the initials of IB asked her mother to do a payment of 20 dollars in one of the games I was playing. The mother agreed, paid the amount with her credit card details and continued to let the little boy play for the next few days. The surprise came when the receipt for hundreds of dollars charged by Facebook arrived, something that surprised both the child and the mother, since they only requested a purchase of 20 dollars. Where this error?
The whale
Apparently, the boy believed that all the purchases he continued to make in the application were made with virtual money and not with his mother's credit card, since the application did not ask for the data again. To the do not require credit card, the child thought that everything would be part of the game, and hence the confusion, of him and other affected children. Mother asked Facebook for a refund of the money, but the giant refused to do so. And it was at that moment that the whole dispute began.
Like this, there are many more cases, and it seems that Facebook took a long time to remedy it, since most of them also ended up suddenly being surprised by the payments. As if that were not enough, in the files there are some dialogues between Facebook employees, and many show the level with which they treated users. In one of them, they get to talk about a boy who spent more than 6.000 dollars with the term whale, a name by which gamblers who spend large amounts of money are usually known in casinos. The revealed conversation reads:
Gillian: Would you refund this ticket from a whale? The user is disputing ALL charges...
Michael: What is the total spend on user history?
Gillian: It's $6.545, but the card was added on September 2. I think they are fighting over everything. That user also appears to be a minor. Well, maybe he's not under 13.
As you can imagine, if they used such terms internally, there is no doubt that the giant's concerns about avoiding these problems were rather few, and suspicions that the methods used were seeking the confusion and innocence of the smallest are quite explanatory. More shocking cases could be discovered in the coming days, although the agreement that has been reached for their publication is that some records are kept sealed to avoid causing more damage to the network giant, since according to the judge who has given permission for their opening would not serve the public interest at all. We'll see how this all ends.