The BBC highlights an incident from the UK where Danny Kitchen, a five-year old kid spent more than $2500 (£1700) on in-app purchases in a freemium game on his iPad within a span of just fifteen minutes.

Danny mistakenly downloaded a number of £70 dart and bomb purchases offered in Zombies vs Ninja, which ended up totalling to £1700.

Danny’s parents were notified of the purchases a few days later when they got a call from their credit card company to enquire about the unusual transaction. They thought the iTunes emails, which arrived just a day after the purchase, were sent in error and ignored them.

While iOS does have a pretty robust parental control system that gives parents the ability to disable in-app purchases entirely, many parents aren’t aware of it or don’t realize the implications of not disabling it.

We have seen more app developers taking the freemium route as opposed to the traditional model of charging an upfront one-time fee. Most recently, EA chose to release Real Racing 3 as a free title that features a lot of add-ons which can be purchased when needed.

BBC via MacRumors, Image via Gizmodo UK