‘My niece ran up a bill of more than £400 on my mobile phone’

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Dear Which?, 

After my phone suddenly stopped working while I was on holiday, I realised that my bill was much higher than usual and that I’d gone over my credit limit. I’d set a £0 spend cap with EE, which I had increased to £20 for my trip, so I was shocked to find out about the additional charges.

It turned out that these costs came from Google Play. After investigating, I found that my 11 year-old niece had run up a bill while playing games on my phone over a number of months. My carer usually deals with my phone bill, so I hadn’t noticed this was happening. In total, my niece ran up a bill of more than £400 over 40 transactions.

I contacted EE and it told me that Google was liable. It said the spend cap I relied on to stop extra charges only restricts data usage outside of my usual allowance, and doesn’t block third-party charges such as app store purchases.

Can you help me get a refund?

C James

Put to Rights

Tali Ramsey, consumer rights expert at Which?, says:

It’s likely that these charges were incurred due to in-app purchases. For example, your niece might have downloaded a game for free from an app store (Google Play in this instance), and then made additional paid transactions while playing the game, such as to unlock additional characters or levels.

Generally, you need to set up a block on the phone itself to prevent these kinds of transactions. We spoke to EE, and it told us that customers can also call 150 from their phone to set up a block on such purchases.

Google told us authentication is required for any purchases made in the ‘kids’ section of its app store. It agreed to refund nine of the transactions made on your account.

How to block app-based transactions

On an Apple phone, turn on ‘screen time’ mode via the ‘settings’ menu. If you’re setting this up on your child’s device, you can create a parent passcode to give you control over purchases. Once you’ve set up screen time, tap ‘content and privacy restrictions’ and enter your passcode. Next, tap ‘iTunes and App Store’ purchases, and select ‘don’t allow’.

Need to know

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source https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/my-niece-ran-up-a-bill-of-more-than-400-on-my-mobile-phone-a6gzK7u4W2XO