Father's warning over social media payments after daughter spends £4,000 without realising
The father of a woman with special needs has asked for people to be more cautious around paying for items on social media after his daughter spent thousands of pounds on TikTok.
Mike Holden from Stourbridge has urged parents to check safety measures and put in controls on sites such as TikTok after his daughter Grace managed to spend more than £4,000 coins on the video-sharing app via Apple Pay.
Mr Holden said he has also been trying to get help and assistance with either cancelling the payments or helping with payments, but has met dead end after dead end with Apple Pay and Grace's bank Santander.
He said it started when he noticed that 20-year-old Grace, who is classed as special needs as she has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, was asking him for money and said he needed to see what she was spending the money on.
He said: "Grace has been using a platform on TikTok where they purchase plug-ins and things like that and the situation only came to light after she kept asking for money, so I said this needs to be fixed.
"I took her iPhone and went through her bank account to see what she was spending the money on, because of her autism, and started to see these Apple Pay payments that she'd made.
"It dawned on me that she'd been using this platform, but was totally unaware of some of the charge that were coming through as she was just double-clicking, with one of the biggest coins she bought being £599 as she'd gifted the universe to somebody."
Mr Holden said he'd gone through the transactions and found that over a three week period, Grace had spent close to £4,200 and noted there had been no alerts on the account about unusual activity, but the bank account did show hundreds of transactions.
He did try to work out whether Grace had an addiction or was being scammed, but eventually came to realise that she had understood what she was doing, but hadn't realised the amounts of money involved.
He said: "I was astonished about the amount of money and did try to work out if there was an addiction problem here, but Grace said it wasn't that, more that she'd recently lost a job and was doing something to fill a gap in time.
"I struggled at the start to work out what to do before I went to Apple as I was trying to work out if she was being scammed as she would send some money and would have a promise to send it back, but nothing ever did.
"I did ask her if she knew what she was doing, to which she replied she did, but probably didn't realise how much the amounts were until we added it up and found it was around £4,200."
He said he escalated the incident to Apple Pay to try and get a resolution to the problem, whether that was a cancellation of the payments or some other type of help, but said he not made much progress with Apple.
He said: "I tried Santander first, but they were quite satisfied it wasn't a scam as a lot of the transactions had been authorised, so they told us to go to Apple.
"I spoke to Apple and the first set of advisors were very friendly and agreed that as she was a vulnerable person that there might be something they could do, but it wasn't their decision.
"We had to go to claims, where it just get turned into the computer and would either be accepted or refused, so we've done it twice and been refused, appealed and then been refused again, so I took it to a tier one supervisor.
"He said they would be able to do something as they had to look at the circumstances, but when I rang back later on, I was told he had left Apple and there was nothing more that could be done and when I asked about an appeal, he said there was nothing they could do.
"I'm not going to leave it there as I know we weren't really looking to get all the money back and I said to Grace that she needs to take an element of responsibility for this, so I would hope that Apple would maybe give an empathy gesture of around 20 per cent back, but it's all hit a bit of a dead end so far."
After going through this experience, Mr Holden said he has put a pin code on the Apple Pay account which only he has access and asked people to be cautious around social media sites and their children.
He said: "These platforms are geared up very cleverly to entice people to take your money through Apple and PayPal and other sites, so people need to watch that.
"Additionally, you need to look after people who have an element of vulnerability or who are a heightened risk, so check those sites and be more aware as it's easy enough to part with more than £4,000 if you're not careful."
A spokeswoman for TikTok asked for people to look at the Coins policy at tiktok.com/legal/page/eea/virtual-items/en
Apple has been approached for a comment.