Some time back Apple announced the innovative way to buy accessories and add-on game content from right inside the Apps on your iPhone. This means that a downloaded game/app can show you a pop-up that allows you to buy, say additional weapons, for some price. The problem is that nowadays a lot of kids are playing games on these devices. And they make mistakes.
Imagine a kid playing some Animal game where they can buy fancy clothes for their favorite animals for some money. The kid playing the game would obviously think it’s fake money as the rest of the game but in reality, the money gets charged in the iTunes Store account. 6 Year old Eileen from Naperville did exactly that. She bought a “bucket of stars” in her favorite game Tap Zoo for $99! And she bought more and more such stuff that amounted to $420 in the end. The parents were surprised but realized the truth later. They are calling such highly priced in-app purchases as “predatory pricing” and we agree. These apps should definitely have child locks to prevent such accidental purchases.
If you have kids in your household who play games on iPod/iPhone, please inform them that the money they spend in these apps is real money.
[Yahoo News (with Video), Image via TeamLava]
