A recent news story highlighted the importance of ensuring that a device being used by a child/minor has restrictions on the amount of spending on that device that contains your credit card information. Ideally, the best way to monitor what a child uses on purchasing apps, music, and movies is by using iTunes or Google play cards. However, there are a number of restrictions that can set in place to control and prevent a child from accumulating a large bill.

Android and Apple both offer the option to restrict in-app purchases by requiring a password or passcode to be entered in order to authorize a purchase. Using these restrictions for a device will ensure that any purchases would be authorized by you provided you do not give your password or passcode to anyone else.

Another tool to keep track of in-app purchases is by forwarding all purchases to an email address. This will allow to you to keep track of spending and ensure that each purchase being was au thorized by you. This would be most crucial in keeping track of "in-app" purchases which is the most common issue that unsuspecting parents come across when they receive a large bill. 

These in-app purchases are very common particularly with games on smart devices. They'll offer the game for free and then once the game is downloaded, and a person has begun to play, they'll begin to receive frequent pop-ups trying to entice the player into buying the "premium" content for the game to progress quicker or add better upgrades. This is where confusion may come into play, especially for a child who may not realize that they are purchasing the upgrades with real money as the game was free to download.

If you are having any issues or concerns with these settings, our investigators at BCSI are able to provide you with the assistance you need to enable these type of settings or further assist as to the reason why there are extra charges on the bill that you did not authorize.