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A summer morning, around 8:30 am, I had just finished my morning routine and was about to start work for the day.
Then a text from my wife came in: “$200? On a video game? Do you know where this came from?”
She was looking at our bank account online. Two charges — $150 and $50 — had just popped up for “extras” on a PlayStation baseball game our sons had just received.
My 11-year-old was still asleep. The 8-year-old was propped in the bonus room … playing said baseball game.
“Did you buy anything on that game this morning?” I asked him.
“No”
“Are you sure?
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you’re sure?
“I think so.”
“Well, we need to be sure because if it wasn’t you, someone has hacked into the PlayStation account.”
After some digging, we realized he had gotten extra “swag” for his baseball player — necklaces, fancy batting gloves, new bats and so on.
The final verdict was that he had “accidentally” bought $200 worth of swag — an astronomical amount of money for fake jewelry on a fake video game baseball player.
In his defense, the game makes it very easy to simply push a button and spend a lot of money. Sometimes, it isn’t clear you’re even spending real money — especially for an 8-year-old.
Besides that, the whole situation was a parenting fail for me. I knew the PlayStation had parental control features that prevented that exact thing from happening. I just hadn’t taken the time to set up those safeguards.
Fortunately, the PlayStation customer service representative refunded the $200 with the understanding that, if this happened again, I was stuck with $200 of fake baseball swag.
That day, I made a point to set up the PlayStation’s parental controls settings so that wouldn’t happen again.
But what about all the other devices connected to online accounts throughout our house?
How to Set Parental Controls on the Most Popular Services
I know I’m not the first parent who’s gone…
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