Apple Will Refund $32.5M To Settle In-App Purchase Complaints With FTC 252
coondoggie writes "Apple today agreed to refund at least $32.5 million to iTunes customers in order to settle FTC complaints about charges incurred by children in kids' mobile apps without their parents' consent. 'As alleged in the Commission's complaint, Apple violated this basic principle by failing to inform parents that, by entering a password, they were permitting a charge for virtual goods or currency to be used by their child in playing a children's app and at the same time triggering a 15-minute window during which their child could make unlimited additional purchases without further parental action."
I'll believe it when I see it (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple was pure evil about this. I got my kid an iPod touch a few years ago. I set him up with his own AppleID, and loaded his iTunes account with a generous iTunes gift card. I told him that there were lots of free apps and he should save his money by playing the free apps.
A couple months later he complained that he could not download any more free apps. I checked his account and he had spent his entire iTunes gift card. You need money in your iTunes account to download a free app. He got very upset and pleaded with me that he had only downloaded free app and he had not gone crazy downloading high priced junk.
I was able to generate a detailed listing of his iTunes purchases. All the gift card money has been spent on in-game purchases. He had no idea that he was purchasing anything. He showed me. The game would ask if the player wanted something (more time, more bullets, more lives, etc.) and ask for the AppleID password. It was entirely unclear that he was spending real money. No sales receipt was ever generated. I complained to Apple and was told that they don't control in-game purchases and that since we didn't buy anything from "Apple", they could not refund anything. I'm sure that didn't stop Apple from collecting fees on the in-game app purchases.
Will my son get his gift card money back? I doubt it.