Recently, a parent spoke out about her son spending nearly $20,000 (over 463 million VND) donating to Fortnite streamers on the Twitch platform. According to the mother, her son spent $19,870.94 on his debit card during the period from June 14 to June 30.
“My child spent nearly $20,000 on a debit card for subscriptions and donations, cleaning out the bank account without my knowledge or permission. A year’s savings vanished in just 17 days. There has been no response from customer service for over 2 weeks, no official response to the complaint from the CEO or Amazon. Can anyone tell me how to get this money back or how to receive a response?”
She also mentioned that the donations were sent to popular Twitch streamers such as Tfue, Gorb, and Ewokttv, Kurt Benkert, and Meyers Leonard. Out of the nearly $20,000, more than half of the money went to the Twitch streaming platform.
According to the mother’s account, her son was given a debit card to buy lunch at school. He then started transferring money from his mother’s account onto the debit card to pay for transactions through online banking. The mother suspects her son might have seen the password while she was transferring money into his account, or she did not log out properly.
“I contacted my bank immediately upon discovering it, and they froze all our accounts, and of course, the debit card has been canceled,” the mother shared. “Unless I have to accuse my son, they won’t help because this is considered a personal issue.”
The mother stated that she has been struggling with Twitch and Amazon to recover the lost funds. She claims Twitch has not responded for over 2 weeks, and Amazon told her to contact Twitch directly. She had to email Twitch CEO Emmett Shear and Amazon’s legal team, but has yet to receive a response. She also reached out to the 5 streamers about getting the money back. So far, only Benkert and Leonard have replied.
This is not a new story about children using their parents’ money to donate to streamers. Parents need to manage finances carefully to avoid unfortunate incidents like this one.