Beware of Dragons

So a week ago our family movie night movie was Hotel for Dogs. Ben enjoyed the movie so much he started looking for some games to play on his iPod where you can take care of dogs. Then he branched out into other pets, and eventually a game where you can raise dragons. Now, all these games when he came to me and asked for permission to download them, claimed to be free. Or at most 99 cents, but most were free.

This morning Joel was checking the American Express recent charges and discovered around $200 in charges from iTunes over the last week. Upon investagation, almost all were listed as "in-App charges", and many were coming from the game Dragon Village, although there were definitely some other games involved there too. Apparently Ben was spending real money inside the game without realizing it, such as purchasing 1500 gold pieces for a very real $40. The kicker is, the games don't ask to confirm the purchase, or explain that it's a real purchase, or ask you to put in your iTunes password, or anything. Ben was quite insistent that he hadn't spent real money, and rather upset when we informed him that we would need to take all the games off his iPod that had charged him while he'd been playing. Joel called iTunes and is trying to get the charges removed.

Fun!