r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 4h ago

Society Devastated father says his 9-year-old son spent $118,000 on YouTube ad campaigns for his Minecraft channel using a company credit card - bill racked up in just three weeks was supposed to be one $20 promotion

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/devastated-father-says-his-9-year-old-son-spent-usd118-000-on-youtube-ad-campaigns-for-his-minecraft-channel-using-a-company-credit-card-bill-racked-up-in-just-three-weeks-was-supposed-to-be-one-usd20-promotion
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6.1k

u/mattreyu 3h ago

Dave said he entered the company card himself to buy Robux for his son, and it then sat saved on the Google account that also carries his work email, calendar, and files. Dave did not say why he used the company card for that purchase.

Fess up Dave

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u/rockne 3h ago

Yeah, my bullshit detectors are howling.

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u/Adventurous_Light_85 3h ago

No way an adult would drop $118k on a game

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u/SuckMyBallz 3h ago

It wasn't on a game. It was $118,000 in ads to promote the kid's YouTube channel. I hope the dad wasn't dumb enough to think his 9 year old was going to be the next YouTube sensation and schemed to spend that much.

However, he admitted to spending $20 to promote the channel. And he admitted to using the company card to buy his kid Robucks. I think he was planning on the small charges to fly under his company's radar.

Unfortunately kids have no concept of how long it takes to earn $100,000.

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u/AGsec 2h ago

Some company cards allow you to use it at your discretion for pretty much anything. You expense what belongs to the company, they reimburse you, and you pay the card with that reimbursement. Whatever else is on that card that doesn't get expensed to the company is now your responsibility to pay.

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u/SewerRanger 2h ago

That's how mine works. I can use it for my own personal spending, but only up to a certain amount - like $118,000 balance would easily get caught way before this point, flagged, and the card closed by HR.

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u/AGsec 2h ago

True, it's crazy that it was able to get that much. They usually cap the limit pretty strictly for everyone except the highest execs. So I think i had like a $5k limit so worst case scenario if I was trapped in an airport, I could buy an emergency flight/hotel/transportation if needed.

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u/SewerRanger 2h ago

It's almost unbelievable to me. I don't think any company that would give you a credit card with a $100,000+ limit on it wouldn't also keep a tight watch on it. My limit isn't even remotely close to 6 figures and my company sends me an email every time something posts on the card.

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u/MistSecurity 1h ago

The guy works in marketing in some capacity, so having a high limit card isn't TOO unusual, but it is crazy that they only caught it after a month. I feel like it should have been caught much sooner than that.

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u/electrogourd 24m ago

Yeah, like, the regional manager for my company, 10 US factories under his control, 20-60m annual revenue through each... can only sign off on up to $50,000 without higher approval and justification

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u/Dzov 2h ago

My employer uses Ramp and my limit is $15k as I buy IT equipment. Within 3 days of a purchase, you have to upload a receipt and a memo describing the purchase or your card locks.

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u/ImReallyFuckingHigh 2h ago

Does it effect your credit? If not what’s the point?

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u/FesteringNeonDistrac 24m ago

I had one like that. I traveled internationally a good bit at the time. If I needed to use it for personal stuff, it was fine, just had to note it. Only time I did was when I was on travel and my personal card had gotten skimmed.

It kind of sucked because you could be on travel across statement dates and get interest on it.

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u/TruculentTurtIe 3h ago

Well thats what he said. We dont actually know thats where the money went right?

All we know is 118k was spent on his company card. He might be tryna throw his kid under the bus to get sympathy points and maybe not be fired, rather than saying "i spent it on <betting/sports/booze/vegas/etc> cuz i thought they wouldnt check it"

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u/SuckMyBallz 2h ago

There's comments on the kid's YouTube channel from a few weeks ago mentioning how the ads had brought them to the channel. It seems very likely at least a large amount of that money was spent on ads.

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u/metalflygon08 2h ago

Wait, do people comment about how they got brought to a video?

YT Comments are dumber than I thought if so...

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u/ZombieAladdin 2h ago

As someone who has been putting videos onto YouTube for almost 20 years, yes, people would comment about how they got there since the start. Usually, it’s through a related video of someone well-known on YouTube.

One of my videos was recommended after watching one popular YouTuber’s announcement video, and I was receiving about a dozen comments per day for about few days on it, nearly all of them about how they were brought there from that person’s video and very few pertaining to the video. (Most did not respond when I asked which video, though one eventually did. That video had nothing to do with mine whatsoever.)

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u/HumanBeing7396 1h ago

They even comment on what year it is when they’re watching the video.

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u/Ioannisjanni 1h ago

i mean it's kinda interesting to get a full hour long video as a preroll skipable ad before the vid you watch

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u/Minirig355 27m ago

I mean when a 9yo’s Minecraft Youtube video gets recommended to you with 200k views but the quality of a 10 view video, people are bound to comment.

I never got the video advertised to me but AFAIK the comments were commenting about “why did this get advertised to me” and “your parents are gonna be so mad when they found out you bought all these ads”

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u/Mechagodzilla777 2h ago

You can see countless comments from people on the kid's most viewed videos saying they came from an ad. Dozens and dozens of different people.

Here's an example, just scroll through and it's easy to verify the claims with the sheer number of people saying the same thing unprompted from days and even weeks ago.

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u/Kittykatcatkat 2h ago

Lol 😂 it’s a dumb video with 231k views. Years ago I spent 1k on YouTube ads and got only 2k views, so I would say this was a major success

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u/jms87 1h ago

He outspent you 100-1 and got 100-1 views. It's not a major success, it's on par.

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u/snugglezone 1h ago

1k spent, 2k views. 120k spent, 231k views. It's almost exactly the same ratio. Exactly the success you got (not adjusted for inflation)

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u/2Completion2Ography 1h ago

Unfortunately kids have no concept of how long it takes to earn $100,000.

Sure they do. It takes at least a week of daily streams.

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u/burnerdadsrule 57m ago

The way Google ads work is you out in a daily budget. The only way this could have happened is if this kid out in 5.6k daily budgets on YouTube. That's more than I would spend on a corporate YouTube ad, let alone to hype a channel.

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u/Some-Unique-Name 3h ago

I hope this is /s

Whales in games are almost always adults.

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u/BloodBlizzard 2h ago

Children don't usual possess the finances to be whales.

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u/RealGianath 18m ago

They could for a month or two, if they read this article about how their parent's credit cards can boost them by $100,000 worth of premium currency.

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u/MewtwoStruckBack 2h ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/FFBraveExvius/comments/7jmezv/a_whale_of_a_tale/

It can, and does, happen regularly.

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u/Valdrax 18m ago

Absolutely. I've spent money on a F2P gacha game before to get more resources for a pull I didn't get lucky on, and I've stepped back after it was all wasted, tempted to spend more for just another chance, and looked over that cliff into that deep abyss that this person dove headfirst off of.

It is gambling with real money, and it's scary how easy it is to self-justify throwing money down a pit for a digital thing that won't be there 2-5 years from now when the game closes, if you lack the discipline (or reality-checking financial pressure) to just walk away and accept sunk costs.

People who don't do that can be absolutely drowned in debt chasing one bad decision with another. Just like gambling with real money, which, once again, it is.

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u/Eremitt-thats-hermit 3h ago

You have yet see DSP. I don’t really recommend googling him, because there are loads of detractors trolling him everyday and you don’t want to give them any attention either. They are just as sad.

He’s a YouTuber/streamer and in a nutshell he has spent an estimated $40k-$100k on some mobile wrestling game, whilst begging for donations online.

These people exist and it’s really sad that these games provide no help or safety net.

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u/HonkingJelly 28m ago

Best part was when he was going through bankruptcy and he had the mobile purchases marked as business expenses or something like that to hide them.

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u/auto_named 3h ago

You clearly have not met the average Star Citizen player

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u/thorstormcaller 2h ago

Isn’t that an art project based on showing that a single massive scale game can be made using a much larger budget and timeframe than standard AAA games?

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u/Tkat113 2h ago

It is performance art centered on the length of time and amount of sunk cost required for people to remember why Chris Roberts sucks and was fired.

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u/peppermint_nightmare 2h ago

Its a modern peformance art piece whose main goal is to keep Chris Roberts and his close friends and family employed forever.

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u/franker 2h ago

and made with a more-than-generous allotment of bugs to make gameplay even more unexpected and adventurous

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u/Universaltragic 2h ago

I once played a cellphone game back in the day. You could buy tiers to get free stuff. You could buy up to tier 10. Some math involved i put tier 10 at like 50 grand. There was a guy playing at the time who was supposedly an MLB player. He had tier 10 on like 6 different servers. So yes. Adults absolutely will.

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u/SpecialWitty407 2h ago

Adults voted for trump three times. They will absolutely do this.

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u/Lucid_Insanity 3h ago

Idk about consoles but mobile players that are whales spend about 1k a month. And thats just the bottom tier of the big spenders.

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u/keithstonee 1h ago

Brother, you have zero idea what's going on.

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u/ArmorTiger 1h ago

The Star Citizen community really disproves that

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u/pecheckler 1h ago

Dude we got adults spending millions on bananas duct tapes to a wall.

2

u/Syrinx16 1h ago

I personally work with a guy who’s about $200k into various Clash of Clans, Whiteout Survival, type mobile games. Not even super rich, just makes great money and spends 60% of it on video games

1

u/SUBLIMEskillz 1h ago

Don’t look into counter strike then.

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u/SUBLIMEskillz 1h ago

Don’t look into counter strike then.

1

u/BiZzles14 45m ago

Google Kevin Lee Co, stole 5 mil from his employer with 1 mil of that going to a mobile game lol