Has Your Child Ever Bought Something With Your Credit Card You Didn’t Know About?

Angel here and earlier this week I discovered some suspicious charges to our bank account, after further investigating I realized Tuck had charged over $800 to Xbox Live without my knowledge.

Yes you just read that right.  I am sure after you judged my financial and parenting skills you thought to yourself how in the world did she not know.  Here's my best explanation.  Last year for Christmas we got the boys a subscription to Xbox Live.  It was only a three-month deal and you got it for cheaper (the first clue I should have run the other way).  One thing lead to another and I let Braden convince me to leave my card hooked to the site.  He always asked if he could purchase something and would pay me with money from work.  I didn't even think about Tucker charging items to the account until Monday night when I signed onto Paypal and noticed several random charges.  Once I took a closer look I realized it was for Madden 22 and then I knew exactly who the culprit was...TUCK!

I felt like a total failure as a parent not having a clue until I posted my shame to social media for others to gasp and judge.  Let the comments begin.  To my complete surprise, I was not alone.  Here are a few of the comments from other parents I receive;

Kristi Kriby- My son did that once, not $800, only $200 but still.  I called them and they refunded my money... My son bought $200.00 worth of coins.

Denise Rideout- Reagan got on Billy's phone on Amazon and ordered $600 worth of fidgets...lol...Chantay caught it quickly and went and canceled all the orders.

Lisa Clements- Joseph bought about $300 worth of shows and movies on Directv even though I had the setting set to where he couldn’t purchase anything. I called, explained the situation and they refunded it.

Danielle Hardison-Yep my son did it too luckily they refunded all of it but $26 of the $926 he spent.

Jennifer Denise- Oh my!! Report it as fraudulent ... our oldest did this a while back for over $1k we got it all back after Kyle called them, thank goodness.

See so I am not the only parent who has been taken by their child.  Thankfully I contacted Paypal and Microsoft and they will be refunding a portion of the money.  Lesson Learned.

I will add parents be careful having credit cards/bank accounts linked to Amazon or other accessible places.  Kids have no concept of money and there is nothing tangible there for them to understand.  They push the button and it's done.

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For the record, I didn't lose my crap on Tucker.  I took a deep breath and realized the damage was already done.  I very calmly explained to him what he did and that he would not have access to Madden or Xbox for a while.

I honestly feel like my mother is looking down from heaven laughing as she remembers the time I took a set of her old checks and bought everyone in my third-grade class stuff from the school book store.  I was super generous so there's that.