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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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).
Not fully developed is not the same as not developed at all. This isn't an example of a rash purchase. The kid stole the parent's password and transfered money between the accounts over a period of 15 days. That means premeditation and repeatedly doing it over 2 weeks. Its not a case of /omg these shoes are so cool im going to buy them anyways eventhough i cant afford it/. This was planned and carried out over a period of 15 days.
I understand that kids can get carried away and do stupid things sometimes. But its not like teenagers have no control over their actions. We (mostly) don't see teenagers holding up banks, going on mass murder sprees, etc.
I'm not suggesting punative punishment. I'm only suggesting that the parent take the direct consequences of the kid's actions. If your five year old breaks something in a store, nobody really thinks its the five year olds fault, but the parent still has to pay for the broken item. The teenager definitely has more culpability than the five year old of this example.
>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.
> 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.
She did. "The son was given a debit card with a nominal balance to buy school lunches ..." but "He then began transferring money from his mother's account to pay for the transaction." The son defeated the protections in place.
We have a credit card with Capital One because they allow for credit cards to minors with a monthly limit that you can adjust. My 3 kids started out at $250/limit (way more than I expect them to need but also what we could live with if one of them got carried away). My oldest hit her limit once for textbooks and then again for college application fees. So we increased just her limit.
It's really nice that they can use this to get familiar with credit cards and show to us that they're trustworthy. Instead of me buying a textbook or buying tickets for movies (back in the pre-Covid days) or making sure I have cash, they take care of it themselves and I get the statement.
I don't know if there is any benefit to them for credit scores because my oldest isn't quite 18 and none of the credit agencies will report until they are 18. But they're all on 1GB/data plans (Tello for $11/month) on their own credit cards.
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.
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.
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.
The parent isn't really admiting fault if they want the money back. Son bought something "intangible" he can't return (twitch donations arent just donations, they are buying social status). Returning the donation means that the intangible items were obtained for "free".
It sucks all around but someone has to end up holding the bag
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...
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.
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.
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.
> “Unless I press charges against my son, they will not help as this is considered friendly fraud.”
They being the bank. So unless Twitch/Amazon or the Streamers are willing to give her a refund she’s between a $20,000 rock and her son doing hard time.
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
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.
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.
47 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 92.6 ms ] threadThis is a parenting failure in the first place.
"debit cards" have far fewer protections and opportunities for chargebacks than credit cards in the US.
As a parent myself this story makes me really glad I did.
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.
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.
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.
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... ("Understanding the Teen Brain")
I understand that kids can get carried away and do stupid things sometimes. But its not like teenagers have no control over their actions. We (mostly) don't see teenagers holding up banks, going on mass murder sprees, etc.
I'm not suggesting punative punishment. I'm only suggesting that the parent take the direct consequences of the kid's actions. If your five year old breaks something in a store, nobody really thinks its the five year olds fault, but the parent still has to pay for the broken item. The teenager definitely has more culpability than the five year old of this example.
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.
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.
Set up something to sum transactions over x days, and have it test you when it hits the limit.
It's really nice that they can use this to get familiar with credit cards and show to us that they're trustworthy. Instead of me buying a textbook or buying tickets for movies (back in the pre-Covid days) or making sure I have cash, they take care of it themselves and I get the statement.
I don't know if there is any benefit to them for credit scores because my oldest isn't quite 18 and none of the credit agencies will report until they are 18. But they're all on 1GB/data plans (Tello for $11/month) on their own credit cards.
Fortunately they allow $0.00, so I updated to that. I don’t want to get one of those micro deposit checks without my knowledge.
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.
It sucks all around but someone has to end up holding the bag
Did I say lucky me? :/
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.
So what does this have to do with the justice system exactly?
> “Unless I press charges against my son, they will not help as this is considered friendly fraud.”
They being the bank. So unless Twitch/Amazon or the Streamers are willing to give her a refund she’s between a $20,000 rock and her son doing hard time.
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.