14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has reportedly encouraged the practice of tricking kids and parents with in-game purchases.
Facebook has been trying to paint itself as a pioneer in the digital space, and we all know that being first also means that you’re prone to make mistakes. Most of the time, Facebook is trying to seem like they just made a mistake, they didn’t know, and they are correcting it.
The same happened with the avalanche of fake news on Facebook. After months of investigations, allegations, and finally admissions, the company made some changes. Not big ones, but enough to seem like there are working on the problem.
Now, Facebook is facing yet another scandal, as it turns out that they’ve might have knowingly tried to trick kids into paying vast sums of money in games, mostly by not making it clear what’s happening.
Just the tip of the iceberg
According to a revealnews.org report, 135 pages of unsealed documents were made public as part of a class action lawsuit against Facebook. The allegations are pretty straight forward; the company refused to give back money that kids spent, unknowingly, on games played through Facebook.
As the documents show, this wasn’t a mistake. They were well aware that kids are spending money in apps, without their parents’ consent. This is called “friendly fraud,” and Facebook failed to take action, although they knew what was happening.
Furthermore, a solution to this problem was being planned. Users had to input the last six number of the credit card in some game, and the initial results were promising. The problem was that Facebook’s revenues dropped considerably, so they never implemented it globally.
It turns out that a lot of people have their credit cards were connected to Facebook accounts, and sometimes kids were playing instead of the adults. As expected, this resulted in lots of charges that were disputed by the account holders.
We have to keep in mind that this is still an ongoing case, but it shows once more that Facebook knows exactly what’s happening, and they’re long past the point where they can play innocent.