Twelve-year-old runs up £900 debt on FarmVille

by Darren Allan

Facebook is in the press again, and for the wrong reasons. Again.

This time the furore is over a twelve-year-old lad who played FarmVille, the “free” Facebook game that’s been appealing to a lot of casual gaming fans on the social networking site.

In fact FarmVille has become so popular, it now has almost 83 million players, in other words, one in five Facebookers across the world.

While the real-time farming simulation is outwardly free, it involves making virtual money from crops and livestock, which can be ploughed (ahem) back into your farm to produce more stuff, get a bigger farm and so on.

However, if you want to get ahead quickly, you can purchase the game’s virtual currency with real money, and that’s where the trouble started for this enterprising young virtual farmer.

He reportedly blew almost £300 of his own savings on the game, then found mummy’s credit card, and ran that until it smoked to the tune of £600.

Unfortunately, her bank refused to refund the money from the credit card unless she was willing to report her son to the police for the incident.

Speaking to the Guardian newspaper, she said that “he would be cautioned and I have been told that this caution would stay with him. Obviously the idea of a stupid farm simulation jeopardising his future earnings is not something that I want to consider.”

However, the mother apparently doesn’t blame Facebook or Zynga, the makers of FarmVille, or indeed the bank.

She accepts her son did a daft thing, but did comment that perhaps Facebook should have some form of system to check if a credit card name differs from a Facebook account name.

this is brilliant, really makes me laugh, a good point made by the mother as well, shouldnt this be implemented?