We have heard a fair share of children "accidentally" spending over the required amount of in-game purchases from mobile games, but this one takes the cake. In China, a 13 years old girl deliberately spent around 449,500 Yuan (~RM290,000) from her mother's debit card.
Yup, that's a lot of money and all that happened in just four months. The mother discovered the horror when she checked her bank account with just 0.5 Yuan left, and only after a secondary school teacher informed her that the daughter was spending too much time on her phone. The mother then made a video crying about it.
Understandably, many internet users share their empathy with the mother. According to her, the daughter admitted spending 120,000 Yuan (~RM77K) on games, 210,000 Yuan (~RM13.6K) on in-game purchases, and most baffling of all - 100,000 Yuan (~RM 64.8K) buying games for her 10 classmates. The daughter didn't want to do it at first but got sucked into peer pressure from her classmates.
In the local news report, the 13-year-old girl didn't dare to tell her teacher because she would inform her parents about it and then they would get angry. She also added that she didn't understand how much money the debit card had, and she deleted every transaction record on her phone on her mum's phone.
According to a McGill University study on smartphone addiction, China has the highest number of phone addicts, followed by Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. The study was done on the target group that is aged 15 to 35.
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