Devastated father says his 9-year-old son spent $118,000 on YouTube ads

The craziest part of this story, for me, is it was on the dad’s _company_ credit card. Which might not be as surprising except the reason it was already on file is because the dad used his company’s (not _his_ company, the company he works for as an employee) credit card to buy Roblox for his son previously.

Is this common? I’ve had access to company credit cards before on a one-off basis (never in my name). Do people legitimately make this mistake? “oops, I put it on the company cards”?

There are so many things wrong with this story before you even get to the headline.

From the information in the article, I can’t really blame Google for this one. This was a series of deliberate blunders on the part of the father. The first blunder was letting a 9 year old have a YouTube account.

Putting aside whether a 9 year old should be making videos, the father should have been the one with the account and managing the channel.

I feel something is horribly wrong with these ad-companies if there is no contact and automatic approval for spending over 100k on ads... From seemingly small and unknown entity.

I would expect some verification or contact, but maybe I just don't understand how world operates...

This is one reason why I don't save my payment method for anything. No saved payment method means one less way for surprise charges.

When I was 9, long ago in the dial-up age, I dialed into a long distance number within our area code and we got a $100 charge for my using Active Worlds.

Suddenly, I don't feel so bad about that anymore.

Do not let that kid (or his dad) anywhere near an OpenClaw instance.

Didn't the card have a limit?

They should have to ask for the ccv every double in billing average.

I blame youtube. I feel like any online service provider has a duty to verify your identity on transactions over $10k USD by default and that should be enshrined in law. Honestly maybe lower.

Well, at least he has the YouTube ads.

This can be a fairly pure case study on the convergence rate of youtube ads.