Six-Year Old Spends $16K on Sonic App

Sonic Forces is a pretty divisive game. Some can’t even imagine spending the forty bucks it cost at launch, but can you imagine spending sixteen thousand dollars on it?

Okay, to be fair, the Sonic Forces in question isn’t the console platformer in which you create your own character, but its mobile counterpart, formerly known and distinguished by the name Sonic Forces: Speed Battle.

That’s what six-year old George Johnson was playing when he racked up the astronomical fee. Suffice to say, he may very well be one of the guys kicking your butt if you’ve ever tried playing the game recently, as well.

You see, in Sonic Forces (the mobile game, not the console game, just to make sure we’re clear), you’re able to unlock a wide variety of characters by collecting cards through various means. These range from familiar faces from the game (Sonic, Classic Sonic, Shadow) to those not playable in the console version (Knuckles, Vector, Tails) to those not even in the game at all (Blaze, Cream, Jet), to say nothing of all the special event versions and others (Movie Sonic, Longclaw, Whisper, Tangle, Lunar Blaze, Christmas Elf Classic Sonic, and so on).

You have to acquire the requisite number of cards to unlock a character, and in special event cases, these are typically within a limited amount of time (about a week, give or take, though they tend to cycle back around eventually, and cards you’ve acquired in one event don’t expire prior to the next go-round). However, the cards aren’t just used for unlocking — they’re also used in conjunction with rings to level up your character, increasing their stats and the capabilities of their unique special moves.

Unlike Forces‘ endless runner sister game Sonic Dash, you can’t just dump rings into a character to max out their stats, you need more and more cards to increase their level. This means a lot of playing, especially for rarer characters, like those who are only available by beating certain challenges during special events, and the payouts for those characters tend to be a lot smaller. For instance, winning a race and getting a good chest could potentially net you over a dozen Classic Sonics, easy. But for Elf Classic Sonic, you might get one or two for the same amount of work — that is, assuming there aren’t multiple special characters up for grabs at the same time, in which case you might not even get any of the desired character for the work you put in.

That means you’ll have to grind those challenges quite a bit in a relatively short time. Oh, except you can’t just play the next challenge — to do so will cost you two of the game’s hard currency, red rings, if you try before the timer runs down in a few hours. And the amount multiplies with each subsequent attempt. If you don’t, you’ll wind up with a rare character, but a low-level one by the time the event ends. But hey, that’s the game, you do what you’ve got to do.

Or you can just spend money on it.

Sonic Forces is a free-to-play game, but besides the ads (which can be removed with any purchase), they’ve got to make their investment back somehow. So naturally, they do it by making the grind a little bit easier — spend real-world money to purchase either chests with guaranteed numbers of rarer cards, or red rings to buy loot chests with more random contents, copious amounts of rings to additionally pour into your characters, or just to play through more challenges without waiting. For $2.79, you can get 150 red rings (“Pocket Money”), but for a whopping $140, you can get 17,500 red rings (“The Hoard”).

That brings us back to young George Johnson. Back on July 9th, young Mr. Johnson went on a spending spree while his mother was in the next room, and discovered that there were 25 charges totalling over $2,500. With sums of $601 here, $562 there, and so on going to her Chase account, she called the bank and soon learned that the charges weren’t itemized, but being bundled, making it tougher to pinpoint that it was coming from a mobile app. By the time it hit $16,293.10, she filed a fraud claim, only to be told in October that the charges were indeed legitimate, and she would need to contact Apple to discuss the matter further.

It took some doing — there was a “buried running list of all the charges. You wouldn’t know how to [find] it without someone directing you,” she told NYPost.com. Unfortunately, the service rep informed Johnson that she was out of luck — “[Apple] said, ‘Tough.’ They told me that, because I didn’t call within 60 days of the charges, that they can’t do anything,” she said. “The reason I didn’t call within 60 days is because Chase told me it was likely fraud — that PayPal and Apple.com are top fraud charges.”

Not being able to make their mortgage didn’t soften their stance. “There’s a setting, you should have known,” she recalled being told. “Obviously, if I had known there was a setting for that, I wouldn’t have allowed my 6-year-old to run up nearly $20,000 in charges for virtual gold rings.”

“These games are designed to be completely predatory and get kids to buy things,” she added. “What grown-up would spend $100 on a chest of virtual gold coins?”

Of all years for this to happen, 2020 was a particularly bad one. Jessica is a real estate broker who works on commission, and as you can imagine, business isn’t good during a pandemic. “I didn’t get a paycheck from March to September,” she said. “My ­income has decreased by 80 percent this year.”

For his part, George didn’t understand the money was real. “How could he?” she asked. “He’s playing a cartoon game in a world that he knows is not real. Why would the money be real to him? That would require a big cognitive leap.” George did offer to pay her back, though he may need to find another way to earn the $4 his mom would pay him to clean his room.

“I literally told George, ‘I don’t know about Christmas.’”

Her advice to other parents, of course, is to check the security settings on their household’s devices. “I’m appalled that this is even possible in these games and that Apple devices are not pre-set to prevent this.”

NYPost.com says Apple and Chase “could not comment” on the matter, adding that SEGA did not return their calls for comment.

Source: NYPost.com