Devastated father says his 9-year-old son spent $118,000 on YouTube ads

Robux has a lot of abuse, so is more likely to deny a legitimate transaction as a false positive. He probably used his own credit card first, it didn't work, and then used his backup card, the corporate card, instead. Then claimed it as a personal expense and paid it back.

Corporate cards are generally set up to allow this. If you're traveling on company business, there's a relatively high chance your personal card gets denied. Especially when on corporate travel -- if you use the corporate card for airplane, hotel and car, the personal card use for souvenirs looks a lot more like stolen card use. Companies don't want employees inconvenienced while on company travel, so they allow use of the company card for personal expenses as long as the expenses get properly claimed and paid back.

>Is this common? I’ve had access to company credit cards before on a one-off basis (never in my name). Do people legitimately make this mistake? “oops, I put it on the company cards”?

It's worse than that, because he specifically entered the company card to pay for robux. It's not like he added the company card for an earlier (company) purchase and then it accidentally got used.

>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.

Moreover I can't think of any reason why he would be using the company card in the first place. In any company with proper controls you'd have to justify every expense and/or reimburse. It's just simpler to use a personal card, unless he was trying to embezzle some money.

> Do people legitimately make this mistake? “oops, I put it on the company cards”?

i've done this with like a cup of coffee but not something like a game for my kids! What happens in my case is the charge is not approved for reimbursement and it's up to me to pay the bill. I feel bad for that father.

edit: it's a corporate card but it's in my name so I can actually charge whatever i want but the company only reimburses approved charges, whatever is left over is up to me to pay. As a sibling comment said, what everyone does is use their regular personal cards for the rewards/loyalty points and then submit receipts for reimbursement manually. In consulting where you travel a lot this can be thousands per month in rewards.

Small business, but basically everyone gets a card. We do not have a procurement department, so we are responsible for our spending. The card is in our name so we would be legally responsible for any purchases made using it.

It helps reconcile purchases orders, and on the accounting side for purchases that aren’t directly attributable to something we track in the ERP.

The dangerous part is effectively it’s tied to virtually unlimited credit without oversight, but it’s a serious criminal offence to miss use it so no one is going to purposely use it for personal expenses (embezzlement/fraud).

I have a company card on a permanent basis. I have not added it to Apple Pay exactly for this reason, I don’t want to risk accidentally selecting it for a private purchase.

I used to have a company credit card which I didn't use much--and avoided using whenever I could because I got more personal benefits on my own card (and that was a pretty universal attitude among most people to the annoyance of the powers that be). We were personally responsible for the monthly bills ourselves in any case. Never had a corporate card that the company just paid off no questions asked.

He also says in the video that he spent 20$ with the company card on ads. (which probably made it much easier for the kid to spend much more on it)

I havent had a company card for a while, but when i had one the end of the month auditing was exhausting, I dreaded having to put together the report... Unfortunately for me, no one else wanted to take on the responsibility so I just had to do that for years...

if you can get away with putting it on the company card why not? (other than that time ayour 9 year old son spent 118k) hehe

> Is this common? I’ve had access to company credit cards before on a one-off basis (never in my name). Do people legitimately make this mistake? “oops, I put it on the company cards”?

A very good friend was in IT support... Clients were visiting the country and his boss couldn't take care of the clients (last minute family issue or something). Somehow he tasked my buddy to "entertain" the clients and gave him a company card.

My friend went berzerk: restaurant, then too many drinks in pubs, then titties-club with champagne bottles etc.

He hardly remembered a thing in the morning and he exploded the company credit card spendings (not $118 K but well into the 5 digits).

The boss told him: "Oh well, at least the clients had fun". And my friend didn't get fired (which he thought he would).

Don't know if it's common but I take it's not that rare.

I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to put personal expenses on my company card but I anyway always have to upload a receipt and for personal expenses I will have to reimburse them (FAANG).

This isn't a bad system because it allows for use in case of absolute emergency, but you have the safeguard of anyway requiring a receipt and a justification.

I had a company card in the name of the company. The company was reimbursing it. I was supposed to file expense claims and they should match the reimbursement.

I had very high spendings so it would have been easy to smuggle something. I never did that because it is simply stealing.

I now have a company card at my name. The company bears the cost and it has an extended reimbursement time. I have to reimburse it so it is in my interest to file expense claims quickly. But I could use it for anything.

I have always had company cards. I never used them except when forced. It’s not a mistake to use it unless you have no business working in a job where you have access to someone else’s money.

Some people are not very smart.

The article doesn't call it out very loudly, but...

"to a company credit card the father had saved to his own Google account, which his son also used"

It sounds like the son didn't have an account. It was just the father's account, with billing info attached with no limits.

Yes and showing the kid how to spam others when he's unhappy with not having as many viewers ad professional streamers is also questionable.

If I remember correctly I got a call from GMG, 15 years ago, to confirm a purchase of … $15 game key. Maybe Google Ads have such great deal with card acquirers they don't care about fraud/chargeback rate. Or it is the other way around, the amount of fraudulent spending is so high they don't even try fighting it.

> maybe I just don't understand how world operates Amazon decided friction during purchase is more costly than asking for CVV/CVC. For better or worse (like in case of Ford Pinto) corporations can count their money.

i don't think it's that normal which is why it's newsworthy. I'm a father of a 16 and 14 year old. The 14 year old had a youtube channel when he was 9 or 10. I helped him set it up, he was making Minecraft tutorials which I thought was pretty cool.

Literally the first sentence in the article

"The button said approved every time as nobody had set a limit."

Corporate cards often have huge limits. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49725666

Many corporate cards (or even personal cards for high-earners and impeccable credit) do not have "limits". At least not limits that will be reached with normal usage.

There is undoubtedly still some balance threshold that will trigger an internal account review and probably a phone call, though.

The Overton window of companies selling products that the user is manually buying while intentionally bypassing all existing safety measures? I don't understand how you can blame Google here.

Everyone that thinks its reasonable for someone to set up an ad campaign for their 9 year old son's YouTube channel also has a very warped perspective and is well aligned with the companies you want to blame.

> Everyone in here defending our corporate overlords

Google specifically. The amount of people that "participate" in any thread related to Google posting and upvoting narratives that are good for it is staggering. The ones holding Google accountable are always at the bottom of the threads, flagged.

My internet provider in the early 90s maintained a Unix system with pine and lynx; it only allowed access to WWW a few months after we subscribed to their dial-up. I didn't know what to do with that remote system, but I knew `cd` and `ls`, so I looked around. Somewhere on the filesystem, I found a Hexen (IIRC) demo, and decided to download it via Kermit (the only tool/protocol I knew how to use). It took almost a day to finish, but in the end it ran - I was overjoyed. I somehow even found a cheat code for all weapons, and spent a few weeks playing the first 2 levels, while occasionally poking around in the remote system. Then the phone bill came - for 7x more than normal, on top of the ISP subscription - and I lost access to both the Internet and the computer for more than a month. Needless to say, I learned to watch that connection timer like a hawk, and it served me well for the next 10 years before broadband connection was available.

And yet I see you are being downvoted. The message being sent is perhaps, "No, it's the dad's fault, not YouTube's."

It's strange to me how much allowance we provide corporations and their schemes to make money, and so little for the stupidity of the users that end up forking over their wages.

The father also has to take at least some responsibility for adding the card to a device that the kid is using unsupervised. He also did set up the initial ad campaign instead of doing something more reasonable when the kid was unhappy about not having many viewers on his channel. He gave the kid the opportunity, showed the kid how to do it and then the kid did it some more.

Or kids are bad at setting up ad campaigns.