Ignorant Mother’s £1000 Xbox Live FAIL

Disclaimer: This article is going to be EXTREMELY biased against the mother. I will not be trying to give an impartial account or show empathy for both sides. I believe Microsoft did absolutely nothing wrong and I will write with disdain about the woman who paid no attention to her child’s activities.

Dawn Matthews, 37, from Strood in Kent has condemned Microsoft because she didn’t enable the parental controls they supplied and her 11 year old son charged £1,082.52 to her card that was attached to the Xbox Live account she set up for him.

She used her card to buy him a GOLD account around 18 months ago so that he could play online with his friends. As is the case with everyone else’s accounts and as it likely states in the T’s & C’s, the card details were saved for convenience in future purchases. Likely being a standard, adult account on the console, this is perfectly acceptable. She apparently made no attempt to investigate or put into effect any of the preset parental controls that would prevent unauthorised spending or use of the account while her child was on the console. The child then managed to spend over £1000 on the various add-ons and content that are available on the Xbox Live marketplace.

6 months later, she noticed that she had a rather large bill on her card (this would have been accruing over time, not suddenly dropped on her half a year later) and decided that Microsoft had been irresponsibly allowing her child to buy all this content without ever warning him that he was spending the money. In her eyes, the console should have been able to magically detect that the purchases were being made by an 11 year old and spelled it out in baby talk that he was going to be racking up a lot of money that wasn’t his to spend.

“Brendan is 11 and knows his times tables but it was only when I explained to him that he realised how much money he had spent. When I showed him he burst into tears. He unplugged the Xbox and said he didn’t want it anymore. I haven’t punished him because he feels bad enough and I know he won’t do it again. It is ridiculous to allow someone of his age to make payments without any checks being done. When he is in gaming mode he can’t be thinking about the money. You can’t put all that responsibility on a young boy. It is impossible to monitor everything your children do. These companies should take some responsibility. They take advantage of vulnerable people.”

As you can see, she is completely ignorant of the fact that she needs to inform “them” via the parental controls that they are dealing with an 11 year old. I don’t want to deal in speculation, but I imagine it would be interesting to see the age ratings on the games she left him playing. Unattended. For 6 months.

Doing some very rough mathematics, I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that his purchases were in excess of 80,000 Microsoft Points. Anyone with an Xbox 360 knows that this is a staggering amount of points and content. In 6 months she never noticed her child had all the new games he must have been playing (there is no way he used 80k on Avatar outfits) and he never mentioned them to her in conversation about his day, or what he was playing.

Some people may say it’s not her fault and that the child knew EXACTLY what he was doing. How can someone who has the where with all to play online games with his friends not question the fact that when he tried to access content, the Xbox asked him to purchase points first (which it does frequently if you’re spending over a grand)? That is an interesting question. Here’s another: How many children, when asked if they did something that they knew or have now been informed was VERY wrong, lie to stop themselves getting in trouble? Plenty.

Nothing in this scenario can be laid at the feet of Microsoft. All they knew was that an account with no parental controls was spending money on the content they offer to millions of people daily.

“With over 30M Xbox LIVE members across the world customer complaints of this nature are extremely rare. Microsoft’s goal is to provide parents and caregivers with tools and resources to manage their children’s gaming and entertainment experiences so that they can play in ways that are safer, healthy and more balanced. To accomplish this, we’ve built-in parental controls in every Xbox 360, work closely with retailers and recently launched the Play Smart, Play Safe website as an online resource for families. It should also be noted that LIVE accounts registered for children’s use have online activity automatically defaulted to off, these can be enabled by the parent should they wish in the Family Settings section.”

- Microsoft Spokesman

That really says it all. if you want to read a more sympathetic article about this woman’s “plight”, head on over to the Daily Mail website that I found it on. Or head to KentOnline and read more of her ridiculous excuses. Rant over.

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