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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 (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 44 points 3 weeks ago* (10 children)

Seems to me that this is a dual fail. The father should have monitored his kid more closely and not used his company card for this, but Google should have noticed the unusual spending pattern and flagged it somehow—I mean, it looks like something someone might do using a stolen card, in which case Google might never have gotten its money, if you need a self-interested reason why they should have been keeping a more careful eye on this.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    Two weeks ago, Google served me a sponsored link that led right to a malicious site trying to install malware. Not only did they not prevent this from being the top hit, they even profited off of it.

    The link looked a little dodgy in hindsight. To me. I feel like a company like Google should pick up on it. But they just don't give af anymore.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Having an adblocker is basic security.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago*

    I forgot to mention that this was on a freshly installed osx. I had just pulled Firefox and was looking for the homebrew website. Google was the default search. I normally have it set to the duck or qwant but I just hadn't come around do it yet.

    I also never click on the sponsored links as a matter of principle but I was in a hurry and I was getting sloppy. But was always because I didn't want them to have even more money, not because I thought those links could be harmful.

    They only have to be successful once...

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