12 Year Old Spends £900 on 'FarmVille' Facebook Game

A 12-year-old boy has spend £625 on his mother's credit card and £288 of his own savings on virtual property in the popular Facebook game FarmVille.

FarmVille is one of the most popular games on Facebook and revolves around managing a virtual farm by cultivating virtual crops, trees and livestock.


The player can 'buy' new items for their farm using virtual 'coins', which are won in the game by virtue of selling your produce. But the virtual 'coins' can also be bought for real cash using a credit or debit card through Facebook's payments system, essentially providing a shortcut to a bigger, better farm without putting in hours of play.

The boy's mother (who, understandably wants to remain anonymous) discovered in March that the aspiring virtual farmer had spent £288 of his own savings on 'coins' before taking her HSBC Credit Card and spending a further £625.

The mother says that neither Facebook nor game creator Zynga will refund her, as the boy lives at the same address as the card holder. Instead, Facebook has disabled the boy's account for being under-age (like most social networking sites, users must be at least 13 years old in order to have an account on Facebook) and Zynga has suggested that she use password protection on the computer in the future.

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Likewise, HSBC could not refund the transactions unless she reported the matter to the police and obtained a crime number, something she is reluctant to do this, lest it remains on the boy's record and jeopardises his future job prospects.

She does not blame Facebook, Zynga or HSBC, admitting that her son was the one using the card and therefore the one at fault. But the mother did bemoan the lack of password checks (such as the Verified by Visa or Mastercard SecureCode schemes) in the Facebook payments system.


Is the child alone to blame for this incident? Or should the parent accept some responsibility for not being aware of how her son was spending his time (and their money) online?


As always, we invite your comments.

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