6-Year-Old Twins Manage to Spend $1600 Playing iPad Game

By Madeleine Davies | October 1, 2013 | 8:30pm

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I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid and I wanted a toy or a game, I had to get them the old fashioned way — by pressing my nose against the window of F.A.O. Schwartz and breathing heavily onto the cold glass until some kindly billionaire eventually took pity and adopted me.

Kids now have no idea how easy they have it. They just sign onto their parents’ iPads, beep and boop a few buttons, then download whatever it is they want from the app store. WORST OF ALL, they don’t even know how lucky they are and how easy they have it. UNGRATEFUL WRETCHES.

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Take these 6-year-old baby twins from the UK for example. The pair purchased over $1,600 US dollars worth of virtual pets and clothing, all while playing a game unsupervised on their parents’ iPad.

“Children don’t understand the value of money, they just see it as a way of collecting more pets and clothes for characters in the games,” the twins’ father told the Telegraph. I mean, who in their right mind is going to pay £75 for a virtual pet?”

He later added, “They were just prompted to enter the password, and that’s what they kept doing. These games are aimed at children and the designers know exactly what’s going to happen. There should be measures in place to prevent this, such as asking for credit card details.”

This — and several other incidents just like it — has led the Office of Fair Trading to propose new guidelines that would limit the ways developers appeal to children and make it more difficult to purchase apps and game features on the iPad.

Or you could just send those kids back to the orphanage for a week to straighten them out. That’s what they did in my day and it worked great.

Image via eurobanks/Shutterstock.