An elderly couple were flabbergasted after their granddaughter racked up a £3,000 bill playing online games during lockdown - initially fearing they'd been hacked.
Eight-year-old Abby had been inadvertently buying items and upgrades on a gaming platform, unaware she was blowing through grandparents Liz and Jim Harrison's actual savings.
They have slammed platform operator Robolox for not getting authorisation from them as the bill payers, with the payments having "left us with nothing", they told the Daily Record.
The pensioners had allowed the schoolgirl to sign up to the platform to keep her busy at home in lockdown in Alloa, in Clackmannanshire in the Central Lowlands of Scotland.
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And they didn't even realise anything was amiss until they happened to set up online banking and at first thought they'd been the victims of scammers.
The website has about 100million users worldwide and is popular with children.
Roblox is free to download but young users are encouraged to buy virtual money – called Robux – to spend during play.
But if payment settings aren’t configured correctly when the account is set up, they can purchase Robux without limit.
Liz, 67, explained how Abby had unwittingly spent up to £500 a day on different games.
She told us: “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.
“We spotted they were all to Roblox and asked Abby – she’s only young had no idea what was 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.”
The Harrisons have been self-isolating at home since the pandemic started.
They look after their three grandchildren – Abby, her brother, 16, and sister, 11 – full time but have struggled to keep them entertained during the lockdown.
They agreed to sign up Abby for Roblox in March because many of her friends were using the platform.
The little girl played the online games on a laptop she was bought for Christmas.
Liz added: “Abby is pretty much addicted to the games she plays most days. 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.”
The Harrisons tried to contact Roblox – based on the west coast of America – Paypal and their Halifax bank for help.
They also spoke with Citizens Advice a number of times and finally approached the Daily Record as a last resort.
A Roblox spokesman 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.”
