This is Brendan Jordan. He’s 11 years old and he racked up almost £1083 ($1744) on Xbox Live. And now, his 37-year-old mum, Dawn, is working two jobs just to make ends meet.
“When I put my card details in 18 months ago I thought it was just for his membership to play online with his friends,” Dawn tells UK tabloid The Daily Mail. “A thousand pounds isn’t that much to people like Bill Gates, but for a single mum it is a lot of money that I don’t have.”
Dawn claims that she’s now working two jobs in order to pay off the debt her son racked up, and both the bank and Microsoft are blaming each other. “It has taken me ages to permanently get rid of my card details from the website,” she says. “It was only when I made a complaint that they took all my details off.”
That might be so and this might be The Daily Mail (yeah, I know), but shouldn’t Dawn have gotten monthly statements from her bank or credit card company? And, you know, shouldn’t she have looked at them? And shouldn’t she have gone, Hey Brendan, what are you buying?
“Brendan is 11 and knows his times tables but it was only when I explained to him that he realised how much money he had spent,” Dawn says. When she showed him how much he spent, Brendan unplugged the Xbox 360 and apparently said he didn’t want the console anymore and started crying. She hasn’t punished her son, because she says he feels bad and won’t do it again.
“It is ridiculous to allow someone of his age to make payments without any checks being done,” she says. “When he is in gaming mode he can’t be thinking about the money. You can’t put all that responsibility on a young boy.”
“It is impossible to monitor everything your children do,” she adds. “These companies should take some responsibility. They take advantage of vulnerable people.’
That’s why there are parental controls on Xbox Live, Microsoft points out, adding that complaints of this nature are “extremely rare.”
Boy, 11, racks up £1,000 bill on mother’s debit card playing XBox online [The Daily Mail]
Leave a Reply