
Teenager spends $20k of parents’ money on Twitch donations without them knowing - URfejk
https://dotesports.com/streaming/news/teenager-allegedly-spends-20000-of-parents-money-on-twitch-donations-without-them-knowing
======
boublepop
Am I reading this wrong or is this just a case of a person stealing
money/commuting fraud, and every institution involved being ready to act if
charges are pushed, but a mother wanting to shield her son by not pushing
charges for the crime he admittedly committed... but still wanting the
institutions to act as though changes had been pushed?

I get that she wants to protect her kid, but at this point she really has to
sit down and make the decision and figure out if she wants the 20k and will
press charges for what literally transpired. Or if she would prefer to protect
her kid and pretend nothing happened. Wanting to go both ways and have the
receivers of the funds individually reimbursed her just so she can pretend her
son didn’t steel the funds out of her account by lifting her password just
seems utterly absurd.

~~~
mindslight
The problem with this binary thinking is that the justice system has become
horribly draconian, so a parent would never willingly entangle their child
into it unless all other options had failed. One shouldn't have to effectively
disown their son just to have the system handle unauthorized transactions as
unauthorized. Really the donations themselves should be easily refundable,
especially as they were done with a reversible payment system.

~~~
dmix
> Really the donations themselves should be easily refundable

So what does this have to do with the justice system exactly?

~~~
mindslight
The comment I responded to was making the point that Twitch was willing to
refund if charges were pressed. The donations are the only non-reversible step
here - if the money were still sitting in the son's account, the parents could
easily transfer it back.

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finaliteration
My bank has a feature where I can get an email for every transaction at or
over a certain amount. I set it to $0.01 awhile back so that I could see
transactions come in without having to constantly log in to my account online.

As a parent myself this story makes me really glad I did.

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
I wonder if there are any banks / credit card companies that would allow you
to auto-disable the card if daily/weekly spending exceeds a threshold of your
choosing.

Would be a nice feature allowing you to easily prevent high dollar fraud.

Sort of a self-imposed, periodically resetting limit that you can manually
override if needed.

~~~
finaliteration
My bank does allow setting a per transaction limit, but nothing on a daily or
weekly basis from what I can see. I agree it would be a great feature for
controlling spending, or for setting reasonable limits for kids and teens.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The canonical method for this is to setup a checking account for your child,
provision a debit card for them, and transfer funds in as needed from your own
accounts they have no access to (so the blast radius is limited to the amount
you transfer into their account). This breaks down if your kid discovers your
banking credentials (use 2FA!), transfers funds without your knowledge, and
you refuse to press charges.

You could also issue an authorized user American Express card to your child if
they're old enough (13 is the minimum age), and enable spending limits (they
are the only issuer I'm aware of that has this feature, Citi only supports it
for their Costco card and the Barclays implementation is very limited). This
only works if where your kid needs to spend accepts Amex of course, and will
not protect you from "friendly fraud".

Parenting is hard.

~~~
bawolff
Children aren't actual idiots.

Teenagers are old enough to know that stealing 20k is wrong. Some sort of
massive parenting failure happened here, and the end result is that the parent
is out 20k. Parents are responsible for their children, and actions have
consequences.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The part of your brain that internalizes consequences doesn't fully develop
until you're around 25 years old. I've helped provide additional
knowledge/context, it's up to you to work on the empathy (your comment comes
across very much as "sucks to be you", which is both unrealistic and very
uncool considering the reality of parenting and human development).

Children and teens very much are idiots, generally speaking (see: previously
high teen birth rates, ongoing high teen auto insurance rates, and the
principal of sealing juvenile court records to give teens a “do over” for most
criminal offenses).

[https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...](https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&ContentID=3051)
("Understanding the Teen Brain")

~~~
waste_monk
>The part of your brain that internalizes consequences doesn't fully develop
until you're around 25 years old

You're providing excuses for a teenager, when children become capable of
understanding that stealing is bad around age 3 to 5 - he is far too old for
the "idiot kid" excuse to fly. Even if he didn't get the whole "having a
criminal record can ruin your future life" in the concrete sense, they should
absolutely know better than to steal. They said they had no idea it was so
much, but even so it is beyond belief that they thought no one would notice
tens or hundreds of dollars stolen, let alone tens of thousands, or that they
could get away with it.

Frankly, society is far too eager to excuse criminal kids who do things like
this and then cry about having to face consequences. The parents should file a
police report, it will be a very harsh lesson to the kid but he has screwed up
on an incredible scale. I do feel sorry for these young offenders who have
their future seriously altered, but empathy should not get in the way of the
parent being made whole from the crime comitted against them.

~~~
bawolff
> The parents should file a police report, it will be a very harsh lesson to
> the kid but he has screwed up on an incredible scale

I actually disagree. If it was my kid, i would be willing to eat the 20k in
exchange for protecting them from the legal system. That's not to say there
wouldn't be consequences, i would be pretty livid, but 20k would be a small
price to pay. This may be influenced though by (like many hn'ers) being
employed in the tech industry, where 20k is a substantial sum, but not
lifesavings amount of money.

The issue I see is that streamers are real people, with hopes dreams, etc.
They may have already spent the money donated to them, etc. Sure if it was
actually stolen its reasonable to require them to give it back. One of the
reasons the penalty for stealing is harsh, is because it doesn't just hurt the
person stole from, but also the people who were paid in the stolen money. The
parent wants to be made whole without any of the consequences coming back to
either the son or the parent. This isn't fair to the streamers. Either the
parent needs to take the responsibility for the stolen money (which she has
elected to do by not pressing charges, but it comes with a 20k price tag) or
needs to throw teenager under the bus in order to be made whole under the
normal legal system. In the article, the parent wants both to shield the kid
from the legal system but also disavow herself from his actions. But its
unfair to other hurt parties to have both. Either the parent takes on
responsibility for the kid's actions or she doesn't. There is no magic
loophole where the parent takes responsibility but doesn't end up with
consequences, nor should there be.

------
mvid
The fact that it is twitch is really not important to the story, it’s
basically a kid who robbed his parents

~~~
raffraffraff
Yeah. I don't have kids so I have no idea how I'd actually react in that
situation, but I'm pretty sure I'd sell all his stuff, change the locks, rent
out his room and completely disown him.

~~~
scrollaway
Good thing you don't have kids then, because that sort of parenting would just
guarantee to make things worse for you and the teenager.

This is a parenting failure in the first place.

~~~
saurik
(I would read the comment you are responding to as sarcasm making the same
point that this is a "parenting failure".)

~~~
birdyrooster
No, that is literally how many people think on the daily.

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danielfoster
I feel bad for the parent, who took responsibility and admitted fault. I don’t
see why Twitch can’t undo the transactions, which were clearly fraudulent.

~~~
Schiendelman
If not Twitch, the credit card issuer.

~~~
bsder
"Debit card" not "credit card".

That's one of the problems. People think you get the same level of protection
on a debit card that you do on a credit card, and that's simply not true.

In the US, _never_ use debit cards. Always use a credit card.

~~~
gumby
It’s difficult but possible to get your bank to issue you an ATM card that is
not a debit card. The banks have an incentive to get you to use a debit card
as it has none of the protections credit cards do.

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thinkski
Electronic payment mechanisms reduce friction, making it easy to spend money
you wouldn’t otherwise, and lack adequate protections against inadvertent
spending. This is why many vendors are happy to eat the 3-5% credit cards and
online payment systems take — they make more overall. Guess where that’s
coming from.

Easy to blame the parent. Could have give their child cash instead of a debit
card. But that’s like the transportation industry building a highway with a
massive hole in the middle of it and blaming drivers for driving into it.

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2squirrels
No protections in place and blindly trusted her kid. It is her responsibility
to manage her passwords, not Amazon / twitch / whoever else. A shitty
situation for sure but if she wants the $ press charges, if she doesn’t want
to press charges then she must forego the 20k. Not as simple as that to her,
but to everyone else it is.

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koksik202
Saving account with notice period, if you have life's savings put them
separate so can't be accessed immediately. Unfortunately kids don't understand
home economics and end up causing harm only to realize it was wrong when it is
all too late

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diebeforei485
Twitch should refund them. This is ridiculous.

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mrburton
Lucky me, growing up my mom didn't make more than $8k a year - this would have
been impossible for me to do lol. It was also impossible for me to eat
properly and have new cloths...

Did I say lucky me? :/

