p.s. Just to be clear, I'm not defending these crappy games and monetization tactics. I agree that they suck and ruin a lot of games.
These games are created and finely tuned to addict people into playing but even more so into spending, and a lot of them - including this one by the looks of it - are specifically targeting kids. The microtransactions scheme is designed to make it harder for people to track how much they are actually spending.
To me, this isn't any different then cigarette companies marketing to children. Sonic is the Joe Camel of today, but even more nefarious it seems.
The fault here is surely the fault of the mother, being inattentive to what her kid was doing and inattentive to her finances at least for some time, but it's also the fault of game companies promoting virtual drugs to kids in the first place and a fault of Apple (and Google and other supposedly "curated" stores) acting as a middle man for these drug pushers, proving them financial services and taking their own cut, of course. This game, which is basically digital crack, is on Apple's App Store rated "9+". Right...
My wife and I put ~$6k/mo on our shared CC over hundreds of transactions. I do review the charges, but it is extremely tiring going through every single one, trying to puzzle out what it was for, and then bringing in my wife to see if she knows what it was for.
The only saving grace is that Chase lets me get an email for every transaction >$0, so I review purchases approximately immediately after they are made, and not once at the end of the month. But, I can understand why that might slip past a lot of people.
Once she contacted Apple and was talked through a "buried running list of all the charges" and seeing the Sonic icon, she realized it was her son's fault...
Apple refused to refund her money, as she didn't call within 60 days of the charges, which Johnson said was because Chase told her it was likely to be fraud in the first place. Apple Support was also apparently cold to Johnson admitting she wouldn't have been able to make a mortgage payment, telling her "There's a setting, you should have known," the mother claimed.
From TFA.
I'm sure my kids would have done this already, just by the sheer number of pop-ups and garbage in some games. But purchases require a password each time, so nothing happens.
It's tempting to blame individuals and they certainly do deserve it like in this case but the general worldview spawned by that only increases the control of large multinationals on our lives.