Any company that issues its employees credit cards with six figure limits will have no issue reversing the charges trying to sue Google.
I assumed it was his own company
Article references his manager
Thanks I missed that
If they have a Workspace account for the entire business, they could be big enough to be in the “Google actually cares because they bring in $$$” category and will drop the charge.
Shit dad overall
Have you watched the video?
Why
Because he couldn’t educate his child enough
- to know he couldn’t spend that much on a whim
- to know minecraft videos aren’t gonna be profitable starting solo in 2026
- to even feel bad at all for what he did
- to even realize how massive of a fuckup he just made after his dad found out
That child is done for.
to know minecraft videos aren’t gonna be profitable starting solo in 2026
How is this something you’d expect from a dad?
because it’s common sense that spending over 100k while earning 0 is not profitable
The child is 9 be realistic
then I must have been a genius at 9 because I got an overcharge of like $10 on my phone subscription at about that age and when my dad told me I was mortified at what I had just done
My parents would never tell us what the money situation is, which is both a curse and a blessing. They would just say there was no money for it so I didn’t understand the concept that well. Took high school to learn about balancing checkbooks and such to fully comprehend what they were saying.
I think parents should have a talk to their kids about finances in general though, not the nitty gritty, but understand how much goes into X to ensure Y. To find out the real value of a dollar in a more tangible way so they know, when mom and dad say they have $1K at the end of the month, that’s a hard cap, and they may soft cap it to keep savings for emergencies.
This post is making me realize the position I’m in and how I got here.
My seven year old has my old switch, and uses that account. He always asks before buying anything and has never bought anything without permission. But he uses my Nintendo account, which is linked to my PayPal, which is linked to my credit card.
This card used to have something like $7000 limit. Last I checked though it’s at 32k limit. I should probably set some kind of spending limit just in case on this setup.
yes…please. Before you get a legal battle or some stuff like that on your hands…
Time to sell the kid
20 years ago I read an article that stuck with me ever since … it detailed at the time that on average, whether you can afford it or not, it costs about $200,000 to raise a child to the age of 18.
So selling the kid would cut the parents losses over the 18 year period
I read something similar more recently, and it was about $250k then. It’s probably even more at this present moment
I mean… $10k a year for survival for one human? I guess that makes sense?
The article I read at the time mentioned that this was the average bare minimum … like a single unemployed parent doing their best to raise and keep a child alive and fed until they were 18.
The cost is higher if there are two parents paying for expenses … and even higher if the parents have any bit of wealth
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that can’t be right (assuming USD), the highest US number I can find is 800k per child in San Francisco, but otherwise the national average is 300k.
It’s gettin’ boomer up in here.
It’s getting child-free, but still majorly indebted to credit card companies up in here.
Dave said he entered the company card himself to buy Robux for his son, and it then sat saved on the Google account that also carries his work email, calendar, and files. Dave did not say why he used the company card for that purchase.
Man steals from his employer, is surprised to get in trouble for it 🙄
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Keeping company card saved to an account that is not expressly used for work is a bad idea. Not sure how that makes one a bootlicker.
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That’s an odd take here.
Man uses company card for personal purchases, then leaves account management with 9 year old son.
Let’s say this was:
Bob has Bill’s key to his house, so he can take care of it while Bill is away. One day, Bob’s son says he needs some peanut butter. Bob says “let’s use some of Bill’s — he’s away, and we can replace it before he gets back.”
So Bob and his son go over to Bill’s place and take his peanut butter. Bob leaves the key with his son.
Later that day, his son is hungry but Bob isn’t around. So the son goes over to Bill’s house and eats everything in Bill’s fridge.
Bill gets home the next day and finds his fridge empty an a note from Bob saying he borrowed his peanut butter.
It doesn’t matter that Bill was off at a puppy shooting convention. Bob and his son are both in the wrong here.
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That’s an interesting case of hypocrisy you’ve got there.
It’s possible for everyone in this scenario to be wrong, and they are. Including you.
Fun fact, two things can be true at the same time. Like corporations can be bad AND people can be stupid.
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Defending Google? He used a company card on an account to pay for Roblox money. Shouldn’t do that. If he had not done that, then he would not be on the hook for so much money. Also, please don’t tell people to injure themselves. Personal responsibility is a thing.
Google automatically saving credit cards is scummy, and should not be a thing.
Also what the fuck kind of company expense is Robux anyway? I’d get some questions from the tax authority if I did that. If you’re going to use a company card for personal expenses, at least do it for expenses that are believable as company expenses.
💯
Didn’t he say he used the card for robux or a smal $20l ad campaign? That’s how it got saved in there. So, he (the dad) started it. Why did he use the company card at all for personal spending?
That’s what I’m saying. Work should be completely separate from personal life, doubly so for expenses. This is wholly on the father, of course. I like the idea of giving youngsters agency and such, but it must come with guard rails and some amount of supervision. The father clearly had no idea what he was getting himself into.
Even if one has one’s very own personal single-owner company, you keep company stuff separate from personal stuff.
There are accounting reasons for this, there are management reasons for this, there are even legal reasons for this (for example if you own limited company is sued, keeping its shit totally separate from your shit means none of your stuff is part of the discovery process and if it loses the lawsuit, none of your personal stuff gets taken).
This is even more so when the company is not yours and you’re just an employee - you don’t want company troubles to end up hitting you and the company doesn’t want you troubles to end up hitting it, so it’s a win-win for both sides.
Always suspect when companies want to start mixing company stuff with personal stuff - in my experience they’re either small amateurish operations, they’re doing it to get you to do unpaid work for them outside work hours (i.e. the “company phone” that gets calls from management at odd hours) or its some weird tax evasion scheme and/or ties you more to the company (the “company car” that you don’t really use for company stuff).
This guy fucked things up massivelly, even if a $118k “lesson” is maybe a bit too much.
It’s not a bit too much, people have to understand what things are worth snd what risks they’re subjecting those things to. It could have been an idiot in a $118k car changing lanes without looking and wrecking $118k that way, or someone using a company card for “de minimis” personal purchases. They’re both things that have no negative consequences 999 times out of 1000, and the 1000th time something goes wrong and you’re SOL.
We’re all smart enough to understand the concept of tail risks, most of us just choose to gamble with our lives and money anyway.
It’s a bit much when that’s a transaction done with a retail customer (even if the card used was a business one, it looks like that was used on a personal account with Google, not a company account) which should legally have some form of limit to protect consumers of unlimited charges or if you want to be insanely neoliberal, at least some kind of insurance (just like how Insurance is mandatory in most of the World for driving a car).
I mean, even in Financial Investment there are at least mandated by law very prominent warnings to retail customers if they want to trade the more dangerous products with unlimited liability, such as Futures, because such customers are not considered domain experts and people even without those warnings already generally know and treat Financial Investments as something where a lot of money at risk and thus are more careful with it even when they’re non-experts.
This wouldn’t be a “bit too much” if we were talking of somebody doing it on a professional setting were it’s their fucking work to know what the fuck they’re doing, but for a retail customer who is not tracking what’s going on in their account day in and day out and who is not expected to know all the ins and outs of it, unlimited liability with no notifications at all is insanelly anti-consumer and only possible in a zero-regulations jurisdiction.
That kind of shit were there are ZERO mechanisms to avoid that a single dumb but understandable mistake by a non-expert retail customer explodes into a life-changing bill, is very much a facet of the typical American way of treating common people as nothing more than money-bags for big corporations to squeeze.
This wouldn’t be any different if he worked for a cooperative.
Irresponsible father gives his business credit card information to his son, is shocked by the results.
At some level of carelessness or even stupidity, I can’t feel empathy anymore.
Dad wants to punish the son and to show him that actions have consequences…
Dad also records a viral video for that chanel and mentions that the chanel is probably not gone for long…
“I left my son unsupervised with no controls or access restrictions, This is clearly someone else’s fault!”
What? What led you to conclude this? I didn’t read this specific article, but I watched the video and as far as I can remember the father says that he didn’t mean to do that, it was an accident and he acknowledges it as his fault
Google sitting over there just like “sux to be you, dude”.
Google is insane about billing any random ass card you’ve ever used in any system adjacent to them. I had them bill a domain name fee to my fucking government travel card just because I’d set it up once to pay for a hotel or something. Completely not the card I’d put in to pay for the domain name - they just changed it on their own.
That’s not what happended here though. Dad deliberately entered his business card and handed control if it to a child…
The dad was a dummy. First, your little kid shouldn’t have a YouTube channel. Second, you don’t use a company card to buy Robux. That’s a moronic thing to do. Might have gone unnoticed but then he got careless with it and it came back to bite him. Bad parenting all around. Don’t blame the kid, blame the dad. Hopefully he learns a hard lesson and can find new work.
Yeah the guy fucked up. Id also say the company fucked up if they didn’t have the cards auto sending receipts from purchases somewhere as well. (Then again it could have been an option the father didn’t have on once again). Anytime I’ve had a company card for something I would turn on all the notifications and input everything into the ADP app or whatever system they are using right away. I wouldn’t even walk out of the store without taking a picture of the receipt to upload it to make sure if I lost thr receipt I wasnt going to be screwed. You’re spending money that isn’t yours, that shit will bite you.
I bought jewelry with a company card so my SO wouldn’t see it on the statement. Paid that off immediately, no cost to the company. My boss was fucking LIVID and chewed me out later. I still have no clue why it mattered but I never did that shit again.
Bunch of people explaining why it matters legally and financially, your only takeaway is they’re bootlickers. Yes, YTA.
I mean pretty much. This is some real drop in the bucket low level stuff so the over reaction here is surprising. Just for that Im gonna go steal some pens tomorrow too.
You caused additional costs to the company by making them do extra work. Do not underestimate how obnoxious accounting can be.
That’s not a defense of corporations, it’s an explanation of why they will get mad, and why it often is a firing offense if you do it for a large sum (because then it might even impact taxes as it can be viewed as compensation, or as a loan)
It matters because accounting has to ledger expenses and balance books. Its a super pain when an employee makes a non work expense and then maybe uses cash to pay off instead of the intracompany accounts, because then the outgoing and incoming doesn’t zero out…usually needs a manual books adjustment to account for the discrepancies.
To add on to this: If your company is not tiny, then having properly managed accounts is literally a legal requirement in most countries and having people make random, not accounted for purchases raises questions.
It wasn’t your money to spend?
It was a credit card. I paid it off with my money. I did not spend their money, only used the card.
Ever heard of paying with cash?
It was a credit card. I paid it off with my money
Credit card is money. Even worse, it is money lent to your company.
Accounting is a big problem.
And you can say it was jewelry for your girlfriend - but realistically it could have been literally anything else. I’m not saying illegal dugs - but it sounds really shady and it puts the responsibility on the company.
With prior communication it might had been okay with your boss, or he would have lent you his personal card for this.Damn your drug dealer tales credit cards?? Fuckin righteous dude
It mattered because he could have fired you for cause on the spot, our entire legal/financial system is built on the assumption that you don’t mix business money with personal money. Your company accountant(s) had to write a paragraph explaining to the auditors how you made an innocent misclick mistake and company policy is very clear that they don’t do that, otherwise the auditors would have not signed your company’s financial statements.
- 9 yo Kid is making vidya
- Doesn’t have many viewers
- Want to make kid happy
- Spend 20 $ on ads
- maybe_a_couple_views.png
- Three weeks later
- I’m literally 118 009 $ in debt
MFW
Honestly, if you can’t understand how absolutely debilitating this is over a tiny misstep, I hardly know what to say. People commit manslaughter and get off easier that this. It’s in no way reasonable to say that “Oh, you shouldn’t have used the company card to pay 20$ for your kid - you deserve life-ruining debt”.
Allowing a child to associate their happiness with view counts is a terrible idea. Already too many sociopaths in “content creation” as it is.
Sure, I’m not advocating for doing what he did, regardless how he paid for it. I’m putting myself in the shoes of a young father that just wanted to make his kid happy and didn’t properly consider the bigger picture.
People buy their kids all kinds of things that are bad for them with the best intentions. We usually don’t conclude that they deserve debilitating debt as a consequence.
At the same time, all my coworkers leave their shit logged in all day at several computers walk around and use random computers logged in with other people’s stuff and they look at me like im an asshole because i put a lock screen password on my machine. (Im the one doing what’s actually written in the employee handbook of course).
So yeah, i yearn for the day they make a six figure fuck up because of shit like this.
Yeah I’m with you.
An extra $100k debt as a young dad will absolutely change your retirement dramatically.
Yes this guy fucked up but the detrimental outcome is not commensurate with the fuck up.
It would be trivial for Google to detect that something is likely wrong with this account, and not doing so is predatory. I’m sure they make many millions in this way every year.
a tiny misstep
Multiple colossal missteps.
you shouldn’t have used the company card to pay 20＄ for your kid
Correct. He should have spent $0 on a company credit card for his kid. He could have spent $20 from his own personal card, which presumably would have more reasonable limits. He should have ensured the card required a pin to use so that unauthorized charges couldn’t accrue.
I feel bad for him, too, but he’s incredibly stupid and I don’t see why anyone else should have to cover his ass for his own fuckup.
As far as I can tell none of my cards have any single limits. When I remodeled my house I charged 45k to one to buy materials and pay contractors.
You have a credit limit so you can’t have a balance above it. You can easily spend 45K of you keep paying off, though
Of course there is an overall limit. I was just pointing out that charging a large amount single purchase doesn’t put anything in your way unless your purchase will exceed that upper limit
Blame the dad
Honestly, it shouldn’t be legal to pull more than like 100 USD off a card without re-verifying the card holder. Fuck these companies that take you’re card once and have no fucking limit on how much they’ll pull from it without verifying it’s you.
Sure, you should have a limit on your card. That doesn’t make it okay for others to exploit you when you make an obvious mistake. Let’s not pretend these companies aren’t aware how much money they’re making off people’s kids spending more money than they’re allowed to.
I don’t disagree that the companies should have measures in place but the point still stands. Dad needs to be smarter. He did a lot wrong.
I’m sorry, why is a 9 year old even allowed to post to YouTube?
IMO that’s not the issue
The issue is the lack of safeguards. In our rush to call out the dad based on the headline, we shouldn’t let Google and the banks off the hook. The dad should have set limits on the card/account and paid closer attention to the kid’s view/ad activities, but both google and the banks benefitted from the poor design/usability issues that led to this.
As for this bit
why is a 9 year old even allowed to post to YouTube
I remember about 15 years ago, a lot of kids wanted to post gameplay videos and music/art they made to YouTube. Some parents handled that poorly yes, but others took the time to watch the videos and approve them before anything was uploaded.
Kids want to explore their interests and it can be healthy to explore it with them, and teach them things along the way. Telling them no outright might push them to do it anyway, but this time without supervision.
Yes, parents have to let kids do anything they want because kids will do it anyway. Parenting 101.
I’m not sure how you got that from that comment.
Kids want to explore their interests and it can be healthy to explore it with them, and teach them things along the way. Telling them no outright might push them to do it anyway, but this time without supervision.
Basically, teach your kid how things work rather than just telling them “no.”
I read it more as, if your kid is intent on something, rather than slap them down, try and work with them to turn it into a positive experience.
Most kids adore doing stuff with their parents. It lets them practice adult skills, with the safety net of a trusted adult behind them.
With something like streaming, it would be down to the parent to keep them safe and let them explore their creativity. It sounds like this dad screwed that up, but is trying to at least own his part of that.
There are nuances between feral parenting and helicopter parenting.
And if kids want to do something stupid it’s ok to explain to them why it’s stupid and propose something else.
What if he wants to film Jackass type content? Or “pranks”? Or play american football? Or read Harry Potter? Part of parenting is guiding your children to more fulfilling hobbies, not just letting them chase everything that’s trending at the moment.
Fully agreed on that. There is also a balance of allowing them to explore an idea space, while keeping them clear of risks and negative problems.
E.g. my minion is currently obsessed with Minecraft. They are actually getting quite good at the design part too. They want to play online though. I’m not happy with that, so I am setting up a private server. It will be whitelist access only. They will be able to play online and talk with their friends through Minecraft, but not random players online. When they are older, I’ll allow it, but only when I am in the (physical) room, keeping an eye on things.
If you try and shoehorn your kids into only what you think is acceptable, then you will have problems. If you have shown you will help them explore their own interests, they will come to you with them. If you regularly shut them down, they will go behind your back, where you have no control.
And this is a great way to do it. Kudos.
As you say, it’s all about balance. You don’t want to isolate your kid from all of their friends but you also don’t want them to do every stupid TikTok trend because all the other kids do it.
Google make it obnoxiously hard to use a card just once. You have to explicitly delete it, and cancel or individually move every subscription an account may have to other payment methods before it can be deleted
It’s ultimately a parenting failure. But there should be way more education for young adults about online safety and parental controls.
If the parent is in full control, then they can upload their content, thats more responsible. I dont personally agree with it anyway, I think 9 is far too young to expose to the internet like that.
I think YouTube should require a password everytime you make a purchase, but still this wouldnt have happened if the parents were better educated. They learnt a hard lesson.
It really depends how smart the kid is. I don’t see the problem with a smart 9 year old uploading gameplay videos if it’s done right. As long as it’s supervised by the parent, the parent approves what the kid can upload and limit how many videos the kid can upload in a month. Comments can be turned off and they just use an internet nickname instead of their real name. Kid can even wear a mask to hide his face. Like it can be used as a learning tool to teach a kid how to use a pc and software, how to stay safe on the internet and what privacy means. Also how to plan and develop patience and discipline.
Of course I doubt these parents did any of that.
I think it has to be the parents account and the parent shares videos themselves. Do we really want 9 year olds obsessed with metrics like views and stuff? This is how you get “brain rot” children, why arent they playing outside or with toys? They are 9, not 15.
yeah the dad could have turned it into a teaching moment when the kid complained about views instead of throwing money at it. But making YouTube videos doesn’t automatically mean they will obsess about views it really depends on how the parents guides their kid, they can even hide the metrics from the kid. There are extensions that will hide the numbers from the page.
Also screen time should be limited anyway, if you limit how much time a kid can spend on the pc there is plenty of time left in a week to play outside and play with toys. It’s all about balance.
Hard agree 🤑🫰😈
I watched Charlie’s video on this and the dad takes a lot of the ownership of what happened and how having all your accounts connected via Google can backfire spectacularly when the only thing the kid really understands from this is, more money = more views, and “dad set a limit” so as long as the card clears, it must be good to go. Crazy story.
The first failure was allowing his kid to have a YT channel at all, or at least not one that is heavily monitored and restricted by him or the other parent. The financial fuck up is the consequences of poor parenting.
Parents are going up against multi-billion dollar companies, no one has sufficent parenting skills for this except the Amish.
Well sure but I mean, just don’t set up the YouTube channel for your 9 year old? Seems pretty simple to me.
Everything about kids is simple when you take a magnifying glass to any parent’s mistake. Anyone who thinks it’s easy is probably fucking up their kid royally.
That would assume dad has the time and energy for that. In a world where both parents need to be working in order to survive. Most people have no clue how any of the digital world works, but we somehow expect everyone to master it all when they have children?
Wild take, tbh.
He knew enough to know that his 9 year old was posting videos on YouTube and gave him a credit card to buy ads. It’s poor parenting and ignorance is a bullshit argument. You don’t have to master the digital world to know that letting your prepubescent child post content online without strict oversight is bad. Again, he clearly knew this was happening because again, he funded it. Shit parenting.
I know single working parents with multiple kids that are surely worse off than this guy that aren’t this stupid and are better parents just by being attentive to their children’s actions and hobbies.
Seems to me that this is a dual fail. The father should have monitored his kid more closely and not used his company card for this, but Google should have noticed the unusual spending pattern and flagged it somehow—I mean, it looks like something someone might do using a stolen card, in which case Google might never have gotten its money, if you need a self-interested reason why they should have been keeping a more careful eye on this.
Why would a $120k spend on a business card (entered by the cardholder on an advertising account under their name) be suspicious?
This doesn’t follow the pattern of a stolen card at all.
EDIT: Dad set up the YT brand account using his employer’s Google Workspace. He handed all his work emails and sensitive auth to the kid too. Dad is stupid as fuck.
Dad is gonna lose his job and 100% blame it on his kid. Nobody that stupid would ever be capable of taking personal responsibility.
$120K spent advertising a kid’s Minecraft channel is suspicious. The initial flag should just have been for “card not normally used suddenly spending a shit-ton of money—does this look legit?” After that, a ten-second check of what was being advertised would have shown that something was fishy.
A $120K marketing budget for a single beat of a campaign would match a company with credit cards with limits that large. Usually you don’t use a credit card for marketing spending though and your Google bill is paid by a bank account. It should have been flagged but they could be using their company cc’s recklessly making this a normal transaction.
Eh, not necessarily. Those kidslop channels can pull in serious income, a company starting one up makes sense.
Two weeks ago, Google served me a sponsored link that led right to a malicious site trying to install malware. Not only did they not prevent this from being the top hit, they even profited off of it.
The link looked a little dodgy in hindsight. To me. I feel like a company like Google should pick up on it. But they just don’t give af anymore.
Having an adblocker is basic security.
You assume Google cares or held to account about your privacy and protection like any physical businesses have such as banks, shops or phone companies??
Have you seen how little regard they give to the meet app spam situation? It is telling how little they have gotten away with care about their consumers.
Try to contact Google as a user.
How easy a company is to contact is very telling.
You can speak to someone at Google for sales within 5 minutes tho.
Now if he was an exec at the company, this would all be okay. They would laugh while paying off the bill for him.
Holy shit the astroturfing in this comment section is crazy. If a 9 year old went into any other store and used a company card the store would reasonably refuse to sell 100k worth of goods. If the payment system Google implemented doesn’t even verify who is paying then that’s negligence on their part.
Fuck Google, but if you’re advocating for them to do identity and age verification before buying services imma have to disagree
You should need to prove that the card is yours, at the very least. Like, that amount of money and nobody even reviews the content being made? That somehow a child has spent over 100k? It should never have been allowed to reach this point.
The problem there is that the adult made the account and started the transactions and (presumably) completed all verifications required. This looks an awful lot like the parent is primarily at fault, doing just a little bit of sparkling embezzlement for his kid’s youtube career.
Now, the shoe on the other foot, I don’t think 9 year-olds should be allowed to be “content creators”. The whole thing just feels like child labor modernized. Which ends up in a strange place when I think about child actors, because it also feels like forced child labor but everyone seems to be OK with that apparently…
That the CC can be used without any form of validation seems to be a problem here.
If Google would just verify the security code or something, couldve easily claimed the user made a willing purchase in such case.
But removing such barriers is more profitable.
it’s very reasonable that it’s the child’s acquaintances spending 100k
In your comparison, the store would not see that it was a 9 year old
It was the Google account of the dad, and he stored the company’s card in his account payment details
And spending 100k on something is not unusual for a company card, or a big company running an ad campaign
You should also look up what astroturfing actually is
Meh, it’s Google. They suck and can afford it.
sure, I agree with that.
doesn’t change the fact that the credit card and ad service was used as intended
If I stab myself with a knife, I don’t blame the knife manifacturer about how shit they are because I stabbed myself by user error
It’s just a really shitty situation overall
Didn’t really need this analogy, as it’s not as clear in this case, more like a child was able to start a run of papers on their own and cost the printer $100k running the printers for 15 minutes.
Should they have been in the printers with access to the buttons? No
But again it’s Google
Should they have been in the printers with access to the buttons? No
agreed, the kid absolutely should not have had access to it. And Google explicitly forbids it. But the dad put the kid in front of it anyway and said “you can use it, but only up to 20 bucks” and walked away
I need to confirm my online purchases through my banking app. But I willingly dont connect my banking details anywhere.
I find it weird that payment details can be stored for one-click purchases later on. It is just so highly and easily abused.
We dont accept this kind of payment behavior at a store for obvious reasons, but online it is considered normal? I guess it maximises profits, which are important.
And when these carefully designed systems for low barrier purchases are abused by a child, all responsibility goes to the parent?
Wild how normalised this behavior is.
It was the dad who entered the card number. It was his fault. He created a Google advertising profile, but his business card on it, and then handed the reins to a child.
The biggest issue here is that dad thought he could embezzle $20 at a time, but accidentally did $120k all at once. lol. lmao even.
Lack of constant online surveillance is a good thing, btw. Expecting Google to have caught this doesn’t make any sense.
The guy you’re responding to has a valid point.
No way the son would get away with these actions at a physical store. “My dad was in here earlier, you saw him, i like to keep using his credit card tho, thanks”
Gee, I wonder why scamming is so huge after turning the digital market in to full “end-user responsibility” and tech companies removing carefully curated practices over the centuties for profit maximization.
Google earns billions of these scummy tactics to get users to spend as much as possible by removing any barriers of control and security. Why dont they get any of the responsibility?
