Your Child Spent Money in a Game: When Refunds Work, and the 5 Settings to Change Today

This is Shemihaza, your sentinel. Today's subject is a child running up charges in a game without a parent knowing.

The conclusion first. A refund is sometimes possible, but never guaranteed — and one of the things that decides it is whether the child was using a device still signed in to the parent's account. So today's task is not preparing a refund argument. It is changing the settings on the device where the charges have not happened yet.

The source is the online-game complaint page maintained by Japan's National Consumer Affairs Center (NCAC), updated on 31 July 2026. Its "recent cases" read, in summary:

a preschool child used a parent's retired smartphone to buy game items; a junior-high student used carrier billing from a parent's tablet; a parent discovered from a credit card statement that their elementary-school son had made large in-game purchases.

Two things run through all of them: a device the parent handed over, and a payment route the parent was not watching.

The numbers, exactly as published. I am not going to call this a surge.

Online-game complaints registered in Japan's PIO-NET database went 8,473 in FY2023 → 7,191 in FY2024 → 6,234 in FY2025. They are falling. FY2026 stood at 576 as of 31 May 2026, against 623 at the same point a year earlier.

The reason to care is the amount. In the NCAC alert published on 13 March 2024, complaints where the contracting party was an elementary, junior-high or high-school student came to 4,024 in FY2022, with an average purchase value of about 330,000 yen. Fewer cases, but each one still lands hard on a household budget.

It goes wrong in four steps

• ▸1. Hand over a device — a parent's phone, a tablet, or "the old phone nobody uses any more". Being still signed in to the parent's account is what starts everything.
• ▸2. Rewrite the check — on a signed-in device the child can change the password and add their own fingerprint or face. In the published cases, one daughter changed the account password; one son registered his own fingerprint.
• ▸3. Payment clears — a stored credit card, carrier billing, or a card number entered long ago. An approval prompt does appear, but the thing that satisfies it is the child's own fingerprint or face.
• ▸4. The statement — discovery almost always comes from a bill. Published cases include about 50,000 yen over five months and about 550,000 yen over a year. Noticing is the last step, not the first.

Why "but I set it to require approval" stops working

The approval setting itself is right. What breaks is that nobody controls whose fingerprint or face does the approving.

NCAC case 2 is exactly this: the mother had required her own fingerprint for purchases, but because the device was still signed in to her account, her son added his own fingerprint and spent about 50,000 yen.

The question is not whether you switched the setting on. It is whether you handed over a device on which that setting can be rewritten.

There is a second blind spot: card numbers entered in the past.

In case 4, the mother had typed a credit card number into her son's phone years earlier for something unrelated to games. He used that number to spend about 550,000 yen over the following year.

Do not reason from "I never put a card on my child's phone." Check, on the assumption that someone might once have.

Five settings to change today

• ✓If your child plays on your phone, sign out of your Apple or Google account first. NCAC lists this one first. That single step before handing the device over removes step 2 entirely.
• ✓For a device the child uses, create a child account and manage it with parental controls. Those controls can require your approval for purchases. If you are passing down an old phone, do not reuse the parent account on it.
• ✓Require approval for store purchases and carrier billing separately. Setting one and not the other leaves the other wide open, and the password must not be one your child can guess.
• ✓Lower the carrier billing limit. In case 3 the parent did not know the limit could be lowered at all. Signing a contract for a child's phone is the easiest moment to set it.
• ✓Remove card details from the child's device, and read the payment confirmation emails and statements. If a number was ever entered, confirm it is gone. How fast you notice is what decides the amount.

One thing works as well as any setting: deciding the rules together. NCAC recommends going through how in-game purchases work with your child and agreeing on rules. A limit your child understands the reason for is harder to route around than a limit imposed in silence.

When a charge can be cancelled, and when it cannot

Here I will not raise hopes beyond what the source supports. NCAC writes:

"Under the Civil Code, a contract entered into by a minor without the consent of a guardian may be cancelled. However, when the child made the purchase on a phone signed in to the guardian's account, the guardian — as the account holder — may be regarded as the one who made the payment."

In other words, what matters is whether the record shows that a minor was the one who contracted. Charges made under a parent's account can fail to qualify for cancellation. Do not assume the money comes back simply because a child made the purchase.

That said, do not give up and leave it. In Japan, billing and payment problems go to the Consumer Hotline 188, which routes you to your nearest consumer affairs centre; NCAC itself directs people there. These numbers work inside Japan only.

Before you call, have ready a statement showing dates and amounts, which device and account were used, and your child's age. It makes the conversation much shorter.

Three lines to forward to your family

• ▸Before lending a phone to a child, sign out of your account. While it is signed in, the child can change the password and add their own fingerprint or face.
• ▸Lower the carrier billing limit, delete card details from the child's device, and read the payment emails and statements. The sooner you notice, the smaller the bill.
• ▸In Japan, unauthorised charges go to the Consumer Hotline 188; if it might be a scam, call the police consultation line #9110. Both are for calls made inside Japan, and either is fine the moment you are unsure.

Those three lines are short enough to paste into a family chat. Only the person holding the device can change its settings — so if grandparents ever lend a phone to your children, they are the ones who need this.

Consumer Hotline 188 is a nationwide three-digit number in Japan that connects you to your local consumer affairs centre for payment and billing trouble. Police consultation line #9110 takes questions that are not yet clearly a crime. Settings and phone numbers first; blaming the child achieves nothing.