Teenager spends $20k of parents’ money on Twitch donations without them knowing
dotesports.com
dotesports.com
I get that she wants to protect her kid, but at this point she really has to sit down and make the decision and figure out if she wants the 20k and will press charges for what literally transpired. Or if she would prefer to protect her kid and pretend nothing happened. Wanting to go both ways and have the receivers of the funds individually reimbursed her just so she can pretend her son didn’t steel the funds out of her account by lifting her password just seems utterly absurd.
So what does this have to do with the justice system exactly?
> “Unless I press charges against my son, they will not help as this is considered friendly fraud.”
They being the bank. So unless Twitch/Amazon or the Streamers are willing to give her a refund she’s between a $20,000 rock and her son doing hard time.
As a parent myself this story makes me really glad I did.
Would be a nice feature allowing you to easily prevent high dollar fraud.
Sort of a self-imposed, periodically resetting limit that you can manually override if needed.
You could also issue an authorized user American Express card to your child if they're old enough (13 is the minimum age), and enable spending limits (they are the only issuer I'm aware of that has this feature, Citi only supports it for their Costco card and the Barclays implementation is very limited). This only works if where your kid needs to spend accepts Amex of course, and will not protect you from "friendly fraud".
Parenting is hard.
Teenagers are old enough to know that stealing 20k is wrong. Some sort of massive parenting failure happened here, and the end result is that the parent is out 20k. Parents are responsible for their children, and actions have consequences.
Children and teens very much are idiots, generally speaking (see: previously high teen birth rates, ongoing high teen auto insurance rates, and the principal of sealing juvenile court records to give teens a “do over” for most criminal offenses).
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con... ("Understanding the Teen Brain")
I understand that kids can get carried away and do stupid things sometimes. But its not like teenagers have no control over their actions. We (mostly) don't see teenagers holding up banks, going on mass murder sprees, etc.
I'm not suggesting punative punishment. I'm only suggesting that the parent take the direct consequences of the kid's actions. If your five year old breaks something in a store, nobody really thinks its the five year olds fault, but the parent still has to pay for the broken item. The teenager definitely has more culpability than the five year old of this example.
You're providing excuses for a teenager, when children become capable of understanding that stealing is bad around age 3 to 5 - he is far too old for the "idiot kid" excuse to fly. Even if he didn't get the whole "having a criminal record can ruin your future life" in the concrete sense, they should absolutely know better than to steal. They said they had no idea it was so much, but even so it is beyond belief that they thought no one would notice tens or hundreds of dollars stolen, let alone tens of thousands, or that they could get away with it.
Frankly, society is far too eager to excuse criminal kids who do things like this and then cry about having to face consequences. The parents should file a police report, it will be a very harsh lesson to the kid but he has screwed up on an incredible scale. I do feel sorry for these young offenders who have their future seriously altered, but empathy should not get in the way of the parent being made whole from the crime comitted against them.
I actually disagree. If it was my kid, i would be willing to eat the 20k in exchange for protecting them from the legal system. That's not to say there wouldn't be consequences, i would be pretty livid, but 20k would be a small price to pay. This may be influenced though by (like many hn'ers) being employed in the tech industry, where 20k is a substantial sum, but not lifesavings amount of money.
The issue I see is that streamers are real people, with hopes dreams, etc. They may have already spent the money donated to them, etc. Sure if it was actually stolen its reasonable to require them to give it back. One of the reasons the penalty for stealing is harsh, is because it doesn't just hurt the person stole from, but also the people who were paid in the stolen money. The parent wants to be made whole without any of the consequences coming back to either the son or the parent. This isn't fair to the streamers. Either the parent needs to take the responsibility for the stolen money (which she has elected to do by not pressing charges, but it comes with a 20k price tag) or needs to throw teenager under the bus in order to be made whole under the normal legal system. In the article, the parent wants both to shield the kid from the legal system but also disavow herself from his actions. But its unfair to other hurt parties to have both. Either the parent takes on responsibility for the kid's actions or she doesn't. There is no magic loophole where the parent takes responsibility but doesn't end up with consequences, nor should there be.
Set up something to sum transactions over x days, and have it test you when it hits the limit.
It's really nice that they can use this to get familiar with credit cards and show to us that they're trustworthy. Instead of me buying a textbook or buying tickets for movies (back in the pre-Covid days) or making sure I have cash, they take care of it themselves and I get the statement.
I don't know if there is any benefit to them for credit scores because my oldest isn't quite 18 and none of the credit agencies will report until they are 18. But they're all on 1GB/data plans (Tello for $11/month) on their own credit cards.
Fortunately they allow $0.00, so I updated to that. I don’t want to get one of those micro deposit checks without my knowledge.
This is a parenting failure in the first place.
"debit cards" have far fewer protections and opportunities for chargebacks than credit cards in the US.
That's one of the problems. People think you get the same level of protection on a debit card that you do on a credit card, and that's simply not true.
In the US, never use debit cards. Always use a credit card.
It sucks all around but someone has to end up holding the bag
Easy to blame the parent. Could have give their child cash instead of a debit card. But that’s like the transportation industry building a highway with a massive hole in the middle of it and blaming drivers for driving into it.
Did I say lucky me? :/