In a bizarre incident, a teenage boy from Punjab spent a whopping Rs 16 lakh on popular battle royale game PUBG making in-app purchases. The 17-year-old spent money from his parents’ account to buy in-game cosmetic items, artillery, passes for tournaments, and virtual ammunition. According to the parents, the money was set aside as savings for the Kharar-based boy’s father’s medical expenses.
The parents were unaware of the situation as the boy told his parents that he was using the smartphone for studying online during the lockdown, according to a report by The Tribune. Making online transactions became easier for the boy as the bank details and card details were saved on the smartphone only. Most of the in-game transactions were made in a month’s period.
The boy’s parents revealed that they learned about the transactions upon receiving bank details. The boy would delete messages of transactions from their smartphones and often shuffled money between two accounts to avoid zeroing down the balance. The teenager also ended up emptying his mother’s provident fund and his own bank account.
“After we received details from the bank, I found that on several occasions, he shuffled amount from one bank to another to avoid nil balance. He was using his mother’s phone for quite some time and she was not much vigilant to notice this,” the father said.
As a result of his son’s wrongdoings and in an attempt to teach a lesson, the father has made him work at a scooter repair shop. “I just can’t let him sit idle at home and cannot give him a mobile phone even for studying. He is working at a scooter repair shop so that he realises how hard it is to earn money. I am hopeless now as the money was saved for my son’s future.”
PUBG’s main source of revenue is in-app purchases where users pay for Unknown Cash (UC) to buy a wide variety of items. The battle royale game has faced flak for its addictive nature, mainly in teenagers. Earlier in the month, PUBG was banned in Pakistan along with Call of Duty mobile.
Earlier A 14-year-old boy allegedly hanged himself to death after he stopped playing PUBG throughout the night and went to sleep. Read here.
Times of Northeast
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