Ouch! Child Makes 23 Back-To-Back Purchases On App Store Based On TikTok Advice And Parents Blame Apple

Apple, Inc. AAPL is at the receiving end of furor for allegedly failing to report suspicious activity and subsequently not acting adequately based on the request for resolution.

What Happened: A 10-year-old child with autism and learning difficulties bought 2,012 pounds ($2,486) worth of coins for the short-video app TikTok using her iPhone, Apple Insider reported, citing a letter from the girl's father to U.K. newspaper Telegraph.

The child's parent stated that the purchases went unnoticed until Apple sent invoices to their email.

"Apple has let me down by failing to identify the unusual activity on my account and protecting me by blocking the suspicious parents," the father said in the letter.

To make matters worse, the company refused a refund when the father went through the procedural formalities for getting the refund for the 23 successive in-app purchases made by his daughter, he has alleged.

It was found that the parents had not activated child safety controls on the iPhone which they gifted to their child for Christmas, just four days before the transactions were made, the report said.

Apple, however, purportedly yielded when contacted by the press and agreed to refund the money.

The whole episode comes as a strange episode for Cupertino, which is known to have the best-in-class security safeguards and privacy features. The Apple Privacy Policy document, last updated in October 2021, suggests the company uses personal data it collects from users to help identify and prevent fraud, among other things.

Related Link: Why This Apple Expert Thinks App Store Can Survive Legislative And Regulatory Challenges

TikTok Partly to Blame? The TikTok account to which the payment was made has four million followers and has been verified by the popular Chinese short-video app. TikTok responded to inquiries regarding the same by stating that "it had investigated, and no rules had been broken."

The ByteDance-owned platform later came back and said the account had violated guidelines relating to fraud and scams and was taking payments in exchange for followers, the report said.

The account is reportedly still active and verified, although live-streaming right has been revoked.

Apple stock was seen slipping 1.27% to $155.28, according to Benzinga Pro data.

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