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Comment by jcalabro | Hacker News Reader

I think you're right, but there's also a decent amount of stories involving a kid with their parents credit card and the parent not noticing the kid was running up a huge balance until their bill came. But yeah, those are realistically pro ably exceptional cases.

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Those super-rare cases are something the press can write about. Nobody would read a headline titled "A 40-year old man spent $500 on virtual in-game stuff". Now, just replace 40YO man with a 10YO kid and you have a story.

The mere fact that we aren't swamped with such stories (I can recall reading maybe 4-5 over the past 5 years) confirms that it's really, really rare thing to happen.

I don't think it's a super-rare case, but more towards the norm. Here's Jack Black opining about how his son racked up a $3k bill on in app purchases in a game clearly targeted at kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y4YSpF6d6w

It would be very difficult for a kid to rack up a huge bill on his parents credit card buying virtual items. The majority of websites which offer these items will have purchase limits in place. The limits will gradually increase over time depending on purchase frequency and monthly volume.

There would be no way for a kid to just show up with a credit card and make an out-of-character purchase of $1k+. This is especially true for games with tradeable items. This is true for the same reason that you can't just show up and buy BTC with a Credit Card. Fraud would be rampant.

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