The parents of a 13-year-old female gamer from Henan province got a real shock when they found out that their daughter had spent 449,500 yuan ($63,000) on mobile games.
Imagine the feelings of people who check their account, where they have been saving for years, and realize that it has been emptied.
That’s exactly what happened to a woman in China who found that the account she and her husband had been saving for years had only 0.5 RMB left in it out of 449,500 ($63,000).
They were even more shocked when they discovered that their teenage daughter, who had used her mother’s debit card to buy games, was the culprit. The girl had emptied her parents’ account in about four months. She deleted the entire bank history from her phone, so she was able to keep the spending secret from her parents the whole time.
What’s more, the fact that the money had disappeared from the account was discovered completely by accident: The girl’s teacher noticed that she was spending too much time on her phone and informed her mother. Then the mother, suspecting something was wrong, started checking the history of bank statements detailing her daughter’s expenses.
According to the South China Morning Post, the 13-year-old Chinese girl spent 330,000 yuan buying games and in-game purchases and 100,000 yuan buying games for her classmates. According to the girl, she felt pressure from her classmates and was afraid they would tell her parents, so she decided to placate them and bought games with her parents’ money for them as well.
The teenage girl’s mother realized she had made a mistake by giving her daughter the PIN to her debit card in case she needed money for emergencies. But she couldn’t have imagined that her daughter would empty their entire family savings.
