A 9-year-old's $20 Minecraft ad promotion ballooned into a $118,000 bill on his dad's company card
Devastated father says his 9-year-old son spent $118,000 on YouTube ads
A father known as Dave says his 9-year-old son, who runs the Minecraft and Roblox channel Mighty Mike Plays, accidentally spent $118,000 on YouTube ad campaigns over three weeks using a company credit card saved to Dave's Google account. The boy thought he was buying a single $20 promotion. Dave learned of the charges in a meeting with his manager and finance staff; the spending continued because no limit had been set.
The button said approved every time as nobody had set a limit.
- joshstrange
The craziest part of this story, for me, is it was on the dad’s _company_ credit card. Which might not be as surprising except the reason it was already on file is because the dad used his company’s (not _his_ company, the company he works for as an employee) credit card to buy Roblox for his son previously.
Is this common? I’ve had access to company credit cards before on a one-off basis (never in my name). Do people legitimately make this mistake? “oops, I put it on the company cards”?
- nkrisc
There are so many things wrong with this story before you even get to the headline.
From the information in the article, I can’t really blame Google for this one. This was a series of deliberate blunders on the part of the father. The first blunder was letting a 9 year old have a YouTube account.
Putting aside whether a 9 year old should be making videos, the father should have been the one with the account and managing the channel.
- Ekaros
I feel something is horribly wrong with these ad-companies if there is no contact and automatic approval for spending over 100k on ads... From seemingly small and unknown entity.
I would expect some verification or contact, but maybe I just don't understand how world operates...
- theandrewbailey
This is one reason why I don't save my payment method for anything. No saved payment method means one less way for surprise charges.
- daft_pink
Pretty crazy. We use Ramp at work and it allows you to specifically set budgets for every single credit card and get approvals, etc. This should be an advertisement for them.
Hope they setup a go fund me as I would be happy to contribute $20 towards paying the $'s back.