Parent loses €1,000 to child’s in-game mobile purchases

A mother in Kaarina, Finland, lost nearly €1,000 after her child made unauthorised in-game purchases on a mobile phone over several years, Yle reports.

Sirkku Setänen said she had initially set strict rules against such spending, but after buying small items for her three children during a holiday trip, the requests for purchases became constant. One child later removed the phone’s spending restrictions and made multiple purchases in Pokémon Go.

Setänen only discovered the spending after noticing charges exceeding €1,000 on her credit card statement. She attempted to recover the funds by filing individual complaints with the game company for each purchase, but only two were approved, resulting in a refund of just over €100.

Johanna Vakkuri, an expert on gambling harm prevention at EHYT, a Finnish NGO, said certain in-game purchase mechanisms, such as loot boxes, closely resemble gambling and familiarise children with gambling culture. Research has linked frequent loot box purchases to later gambling problems, she noted.

A recent EHYT survey found that attitudes toward gambling among minors and young adults have become more normalised. Half of men aged 18–24 now consider gambling trendy. Vakkuri suggested that early exposure to spending in digital games may contribute to this shift, as young people grow accustomed to in-game purchases before reaching legal gambling age.

Other parents reported similar struggles. Emmi Kyparissakos, a mother of two in Vantaa, described weekly arguments with her older child over purchase requests, noting that children often do not grasp the value of money. Many parents have since enabled controls to monitor or restrict in-game spending.