Fortnite Makers Sued After Child Spent $1,000 On In-Game Purchases

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A mother has filed a class action lawsuit against Sony Interactive Entertainment over claims that her child made more than $1,000 in in-game purchases while playing Fortnite. Brandi Crawford says the game and how it is played through the Sony PlayStation encourages young players to make in-app purchases. Allegedly, the game does not warn parents of minor players that these purchases can be made. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this with Scott Hardy, the President of Top Class Actions.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

In app purchases have become the scourge of everybody who engages in online gaming, casual gaming, mobile gaming, whatever it is in app purchases can really ruin a game for somebody. But kids don't seem to understand it, right? I mean, it's difficult to get a young child to understand that this thing costs money and unfortunately some kids who have been playing the game Fortnite have a debit card linked to this account usually that belongs to their parents and they have been purchasing, in some cases, thousands of dollars worth of in app purchases, which has now resulted in lawsuits against Sony for doing very little, if anything, to prevent this from happening. Joining me now to talk about this is Scott Hardy with top class actions and Scott, I can't even begin to tell you how shocked and terrified I would be to find out any of my kids had done what this lawsuit says this, this child did. Spent over a thousand dollars in Fortnite because in order to to sign up and make your account, you have to have the debit card and this kid's just sitting there buying, buying, buying. Probably not even realizing what they're doing.

Yeah. I mean, I got lucky when my daughter was playing a Harry Potter themed game and all of a sudden, you know, I saw a couple charges. I'm like what? Because every charge that goes through, I get a, I get notice of it and then my daughter comes back five minutes later. Daddy, daddy, daddy. I'm so sorry. I, I thought I thought it was free. And, you know, she spent 15 bucks. So, you know, in my case we caught it. We're a good shape, no harm, no foul. But in this case in Fortnite you had the Sony PlayStation, Sony interactive entertainment, which is listed in the class action where this kid was playing Fortnite buying skins, buying upgrades. Because there are certain upgrades and features that you only have access to if you buy them. And kept racking up the charges. She had no idea. She gets the charge statement of that, more than a thousand dollars in charges that she never approved.

And her kid was like, well, you know, I didn't think it was that much because these are microtransactions and I know with my kids and roadblocks now they could sit there and blow through $25 like that and they, that's about how much they get a month. But with these different things like Fortnite and other online games and microtransactions, you're like, well, it's only 99 cents. It's only 25 cents. It's only 50 cents. These are, these are nothing. But when you're doing it and you're playing this game for hours, then those things rack up. All of a sudden you have this a thousand dollar charge and she called up Fortnite, she called up Sony said, hey, I want a refund. I never approved this. My kid's a minor. And they said, go pound sand. You're out of luck. But as we've seen from similar class actions, that answer doesn't exactly work. You know, we'll have to see if they actually do pay out a lot to parents who have been covering the habits of their kids.

Right. I mean, at the very least, they're going to have to put some kind of safeguards in there.

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