Mum's warning after nine-year-old spends £1,000 on Roblox
Emma Bell didn't realise that her PayPal account was linked to her iPad and had no idea that her daughter could spend the money so easily.
In the space of three months her daughter Bronwen made 25 transactions on her Roblox account - billing up more than £1,000 in her mum's bank account.
The mum-of-three from Quakers Yard, south Wales has warned parents to be "vigilant" as she has been unable to retrieve her money back.
Roblox allows users to create their own games but also offers in-app purchases to upgrade the user's avatar with things like clothes or accessories and offers some pay-to-play games.
Emma, 52, who works as a social worker said: "I was really distraught. I did tell her off but she has got no concept of how much money that is.
"These Robux [Roblox coins] kids don't see it as money. It is coins and a gaming app. They don't connect that that is money you have got to pay for.
"On Roblox when you go in to buy those coins the way the options are set up the £199 is the first option that comes up. For her she had no concept and understanding that she was clicking the most expensive option.
"I was upset at myself. At that point I held out hope but as time went on I just felt sick to the stomach and angry that such a big corporation can't understand the financial difficulty this put me in."
Bronwen at home playing on her tablet (Image: Emma Bell / SWNS)
Emma said her daughter Bronwen, who is neurodivergent, plays on her tablet when she comes home from school.
She explained how she tries to monitor the games Bronwen downloads and they had a rule where she would ask her mum for permission before pressing anything.
But what the mum didn't realise was that she had PayPal in daughter's payment method on the iPad.
Her daughter had managed to spend more than £1,000 on the site but the worst time was when she did five transactions in one day.
Emma said: "PayPal takes at least a week to send it through my bank account so there had been some delays in those bills going through my bank before I realised the huge amount of fees.
"One of the things that upset me the most was in a whole day there were five transactions - one of £199, second of £99 and three for £49,99."
Bronwen Bell and mum Emma (Image: Emma Bell / SWNS)
For weeks Emma, was in back and forth contact with Apple, Roblox, PayPal and her bank trying to secure a refund but so far she has only been able to get £78 from Apple.
Emma said: "She had run up a huge bill. I phoned PayPal and asked them to put a block on any charges being put through.
"Then I spoke to Apple and they were helpful. I went through my Apple account, saw all the transactions and there was a simple click to request the refund."
She clicked on the option stating "purchase without consent" which she said gave her some "reassurance".
But shortly after she claims she had an automated decline for all of the transactions and had to appeal.
She was advised by Apple to speak with Roblox and her bank - but she hasn't been given any help since.
Emma then escalated it with Apple and the outcome was that she was paid £78.
She said: "I'd like to see these organisations having some kind of security in place where they would recognise that it as unusual activity and maybe put a block.
"I had bills to pay out and then there was no money on my account to pay them. I was really distressed about it."
Emma explained how Apple have told her how to put blocks on Roblox to stop her daughter from buying coins.
She said: "I've put a password on the iPad and I am a lot more conscious. I am still not 100 per cent confident about what I am doing because I think technology moves so fast.
"I went on the iPad the other day and I am checking it more regularly.
"My downfall was I used to have an Apple phone and it was connected to the iPad and whenever they wanted to download a free app it would pop up on my phone and I'd have to click accept.
"But then at Christmas time I changed my phone to a completely different make and it just didn't answer my thought process that I needed to go and put parental locks - I feel foolish about that but it is a hard lesson to learn.
"I'm not particularly great with IT, I am not bad but I am a busy working mum got a professional job I'm trying to do the best I can."
In response Roblox said in a statement: "Roblox works with multiple payment providers to provide a safe and secure purchasing experience, and we have a robust policy for processing refund requests where there may have been unauthorized payments from a person's account.
"Whenever possible, we work with parents directly to provide a refund for unauthorized purchases.
"As noted in our help centre, we advise parents and caregivers that if they notice charges on their PayPal account that they did not authorize, to please contact Roblox Customer Support before disputing any charges.
"This is because once a charge has been disputed, a refund cannot be issued due to the payment provider's dispute process.
"Similarly, where payments have been made through Apple/iTunes, as the payment provider they require any refunds to go through their support services and these charges cannot be refunded by Roblox.
"Finally, it is very important to note that parents also have access to a suite of Parental Controls on Roblox, including spending limits so that parents can determine how much their children can spend, and spend notifications to increase visibility over their children's spending on Roblox."
Apple, PayPal have also been approached for a comment.
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NBC News
2 days ago
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The phones suspected of being hacked displayed suspicious activity in crash logs, the records a computer or a smartphone automatically writes when the operating system encounters an error or a program fails. That indicates tampering, the company said. 'We identified exceedingly rare crash logs that appeared exclusively on devices belonging to high-risk individuals including government officials, political campaign staff, journalists, and tech executives,' the report says. 'At least one affected European Union government official received an Apple Threat Notification approximately thirty days after we observed this crash on their device, and forensic examination of another device revealed signs of successful exploitation.' Andrew Hoog, a co-founder of the mobile phone security company NowSecure, told NBC News that he found iVerify's 'analysis and conclusions credible and consistent with what we've observed over nearly a decade of mobile zero-click attacks.' If a spyware campaign has been taking over high-profile Americans' phones, it would be a major escalation in the back-and-forth between cyberspies and the security engineers who try to stop them. The iPhone's cybersecurity is widely revered, and cybersecurity experts largely view iPhones as some of the most secure devices that are commercially available. Apple routinely updates its operating system to fix flaws that hackers use to break in. But it has also designed the iPhone operating system to share very little information with cybersecurity researchers, far less than most other operating systems. iVerify's claim comes in the context of other allegations that cyberspies snooped on the 2024 presidential campaigns, including the United States' accusing China of listening to both parties' presidential campaigns' phone calls and Iran of hacking Trump campaign emails and sending stolen information to Biden campaign officials. The Biden administration's Justice Department charged three Iranians in connection with the operation in September. Researchers have for years tracked governments' use of spyware to spy on journalists and activists in other countries. Politicians in France and Spain have been targeted by spyware, prompting national scandals. IVerify's report is the first major public claim of spyware's successfully breaking into iPhones tied to American phone numbers and high-profile Americans. There is precedent for cyberspies' targeting major political campaigns. Last year, Microsoft, Google and several federal agencies said Chinese intelligence had hacked several major telecommunications companies, including AT&T and Verizon, and used that access to specifically spy on both the Trump and Harris campaigns ' conversations. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The Trump campaign did not hire iVerify, so it does not have data from it to analyze. Sources who confirmed that members of the Harris-Waltz campaign were among those whom iVerify has investigated as targets of the campaign did not identify those people. iVerify also discovered a potential way hackers could have gotten in: a vulnerability in iMessage, the chat app that comes preloaded in Apple phones, that appears to be a zero-click vulnerability, meaning a hacker could exploit it without the user's even knowing. Apple has since patched the vulnerability. Spyware can give remote hackers remarkable insight into their victims' personal messages and accounts. While confirmed instances are rare, it is the only proven tactic for hackers to reliably bypass the major privacy protections available for commercial phones, like the encrypted messaging app Signal. A hacker who successfully deploys spyware on politicians' phones, for instance, could read all their Signal chats, track their browsing histories, listen to their phone calls and even turn the phones into covert listening devices to spy on conversations while they are in the targets' pockets. By giving a hacker remote access to a phone, spyware goes beyond even the Salt Typhoon espionage campaign, in which the United States accused China last year of hacking AT&T and Verizon to intercept phone calls and text messages as they traveled from one person to another — including targeting the messages of both the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns. The most commonly identified spyware in such cases is designed by the Israeli company NSO Group, which is sanctioned by the United States and has long claimed its products cannot be used to hack phones with American numbers. An NSO Group spokesperson told NBC News it was not involved in the incidents iVerify's research identified. American diplomats and embassy workers abroad have also been infected with NSO spyware, according to the Biden White House, but evidence that such technology had targeted a U.S. presidential campaign or other high-profile Americans in the United States has never been previously reported. 'I think it illustrates that mobile compromise is real, not academic or hypothetical, and it's happening here in the United States in a systematic way,' said Cole, iVerify's CEO. He declined to specify the identities of the five people whose phones exhibited signs of having been targeted with spyware, except to say that they are all Americans who work in politics, media and artificial intelligence and that all would be of interest to a foreign intelligence service. The fact that sophisticated phone spyware is becoming the most reliable way to read a person's otherwise secure messages makes it an obvious tactic for spy agencies, despite its technical difficulty, said Patrick Arvidson, a National Security Agency veteran who worked on mobile phone security at the agency, who viewed iVerify's report before it was published. 'I think that you're going to see in the coming year, two years, three years, more and more of these kinds of mass-scale incidents,' he said.
