A federal judge has ordered Amazon to establish a process in order to refund parents whose kids made in-app purchases through games without their knowledge or consent. Amazon will be required to alert the parents and it will have to start processing the reimbursements from next year, a new report says. This comes after a federal judge agreed with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year which said that Amazon did not sufficiently warn parents enough that some free games allowed players to make in-app purchases.
It wasn’t rare for some kids who played these games to make multiple in-app purchases without the knowledge or the consent of their parents. They’d only be hit by the bill shock when they found that their kids had been making these in-app purchases and they knew nothing about them.
The Federal Trade Commission had previously estimated that parents were charged up to $86 million combined. It said that Amazon should not only reimburse the amount charged but it should also pay a $26.5 million fine.
U.S. District Judge John Coughenour has said that the FTC’s damages request is “too high” and he has agreed with Amazon that the commission might have taken into account failed password attempts that were unrelated to unauthorized in-app purchases made by kids.
The judge has also rejected Amazon’s request to issue parents refunds in the form of gift cards, adding that the company would “undoubtedly recapture some of the profits that are at issue.”