Gambling addiction among young people is so widespread in China that the federal government has taken action. Songsak Rohprasit/Getty Images
- A young girl in China spent all of her family’s savings on mobile game transactions this year.
- She spent around $64,000 through her mother’s debit card from January to May, according to Elephant News.
- She told the outlet that she deleted the chat and transaction records to hide them from her mother.
A 13-year-old girl in China this year spent $64,000 of her parents’ money on mobile games, unknowingly wiping out their savings account.
According to Elephant News, a regional TV station in Henan province, Gong Yiwang learned about the shopping frenzy in late May after receiving a call from a teacher at the girl’s boarding school who feared the child was addicted to pay-to-play games .
When Gong checked her bank account, she found that the balance was down to seven cents.
She later found out that her daughter had spent around $16,800 on game account purchases and nearly $30,000 on in-game purchases from January through May, according to Elephant News. The girl also wired money to at least 10 classmates who wanted to buy their own gaming products, bringing the total cost of the child’s months of binge drinking to $64,000.
“I never thought a 13-year-old girl could pull this off,” a distraught Gong told Elephant News. “I’m groggy, my head feels like it’s about to explode.”
As she spoke, Gong’s daughter cried to Elephant News that she didn’t know where the money came from or how much she was spending, but found her mother’s debit card and linked it to her cell phone. She also recalled that her mother had told her the account password from a previous occasion when she had asked to buy something else.
Noticing her newfound purchasing power, her friends at school would pester her for money, she said.
“If I didn’t send it to them, they would harass me all day. If I told the teacher, I was afraid that the teacher would tell my parents and that my parents would be angry,” she told Elephant News.
According to the outlet, she also deleted chat and transaction records to hide the payments from her parents.
Gong said she has contacted multiple payment platforms to request a refund, but has not yet fully recouped her losses.
The story about the girl’s spending habits went viral in China in late May, garnering at least 140 million views on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, according to insider data.
Gambling addiction among teenagers in China is so widespread that the country has imposed Internet restrictions on teens and children. Young people are not allowed to play video games for more than three hours a week, a goal China says it is getting closer to.
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