A teenage girl blew her family’s life savings on mobile games, spending around £51,000 in total.
That’s a hell of a lot of in-game purchases, and it completely cleaned out her poor mother’s bank account after she got hold of the debit card details.
What’s more, the young girl reportedly tried to hide what she’d done from her mum, deleting chats and transaction histories.
Obviously, the lack of money soon became apparent and her mum found out anyway.
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The Chinese 13-year-old spent £51,000 – or around $64,000 – of the cash that was in the family savings account, without her parents’ knowledge.
Gong Yiwang – the mother in question – discovered that her daughter had been on a bit of a spending splurge at the end of May when she got a call from a teacher at her child’s boarding school.
That teacher was concerned that the kid might have an addiction to pay-to-play games, and – from the sounds of things – they might have had a point.
When Gong then went to check the bank account, it only had seven cents in it. That’s got to be up there with the worst feelings in the world.
Between January and May, it turned out that her daughter had spent £13,365 ($16,800) on buying accounts for the games, as well as making £23,865 ($30,000) worth of in-game purchases.
We did tell you that there were a lot of those, didn’t we?
Oh, and she also transferred a load of money to 10 of her classmates so that they could make purchases themselves.
In the end, she racked up that huge total, and wrecked her family’s finances.
Speaking to local TV channel Elephant News, her mother said: "I never thought a 13-year-old girl could do this,
"I'm in a daze; my head feels like it's going to explode."
Speaking through tears, the youngster explained that she’d linked her mum’s card to her own mobile phone, but didn’t know where she was getting the money from and wasn’t aware how much she was spending.
She got her hands on the password after her mum asked her to buy something else in the past.
But, her friends were at least partially responsible, she said.
Apparently, she was pestered and badgered by her friends once they realised the kind of money that she had.
"If I didn't send it to them, they would bother me all day,” she explained.
“If I told the teacher, I was afraid that the teacher would tell my parents and that my parents would be angry.”
In the end, that’s exactly how it turned out.
So far, Gong hasn’t received full refunds for the purchases, though she has been reaching out to the companies to explain the situation.
Topics: China, Weird, Technology, Gambling
Tom Wood