Facebook did not care to see your kids charging huge credit card bills – lawsuit • The Register

Even Angry Birds officials have asked why so many refunds were being made

Mark Zuckerberg, general manager of Facebook. The company is accused in the courts of not worrying about whether children have used its platform to charge huge bills to their parents.

Facebook has been accused of not worrying about whether gaming companies have taken away millions of dollars from kids and their parents when shopping in the game, following the unveiling of US court documents.

The group of American journalists Reveal News has obtained a number of exhibitions during a lawsuit against Facebook, in which the surprising revelations were revealed.

In a paper, Rovio, the maker of the popular mobile game Angry Birds, asked Facebook in 2012 why the chargeback rate of their users' credit cards was so high. Facebook employees realized that 93% of the outstanding Angry Birds were clbadified as "friendly frauds" by children.

Friendly fraud is an e-commerce term that refers to customers who buy products with a credit card and then ask their issuer to charge a charge, canceling the transaction. The "friendly" part refers to a purchase made with the cardholder's permission rather than a card theft or the like.

According to the complaint, Facebook encouraged developers to create Facebook-hosted games that allow children to enter the details of the parents' credit card, store them and bill them again and again without further authorization. Reveal News described this as a priority given by Facebook to Facebook's focus on protecting children and creating tools that would have made it harder for kids to make big bills.

Evidence obtained by Reveal News (a branch of the US Center for Investigative Reporting), independently verified by US District Court of California records by The register, consist of internal Facebook emails and discussion logs from people on the social network's payment processing teams. A diary dated September 9, 2013 shows what appears to be a worker and her supervisor discussing the potential repayment of a child:

Another piece showed a Facebook employee who asked why "most of these games with minor FF issues" were "default on the most expensive setup in the buying stream". The term "FF-minor", in Facebook, refers to payment disputes raised by children. It can be badumed that children are shocked to have accidentally charged thousands of bills for innocent games.

Facebook sent us this statement when we asked what she had to say for herself:

"The Center for Investigation Report" contacted us last year and we voluntarily released documents related to a 2012 case related to our refund policies for in-app purchases that parents say were made in error by their minor children. We have published additional documents. Facebook is working with parents and experts to provide tools for families on Facebook and the Web. As part of this work, we regularly review our own practices and agreed in 2016 to update our terms of use and provide dedicated redemption resources. requests related to purchases made by minors on Facebook. "

The Bohannan et al. Case against Facebook Inc. is continuing. ®