The budget was $20. The bill was $118,000, run up over about three weeks on a company credit card. The man holding that card, a father who goes by Dave online, says his nine-year-old son did it by launching one YouTube ad campaign after another for the family’s Minecraft and Roblox channel, Mighty Mike Plays.
The Register reported that Dave only learned of it when a manager and finance staff at his employer, a large unnamed firm where he works in marketing, summoned him to a meeting. Finance showed him a spreadsheet itemising what had been charged to his card for those three weeks. “The number sitting on the page in front of me had about five more digits than it should have,” he said in a video the family posted.
How the spending started
Dave set up the channel for his son a couple of years ago, hoping it would turn passive screen time into something more active. A few months in, the boy asked for Robux, the in-game currency in Roblox, and Dave paid with his company card. By his own telling, that left the card details saved on the account for good.
Next, the boy complained that his views were not growing quickly enough. Dave showed him how to start a Google ad campaign capped at $20. “I didn’t think for one second that this was going to be an issue,” he said. When that $20 ran out, his son simply started another campaign. Then another.
“When a nine-year old gets access to ad account with no limits and a CC that just says ‘approved’ every single time no matter what, he does not think that what he’s doing is wrong,” Dave said. The spending breakdown named his son’s account and listed Roblox and Minecraft video titles, so the source was clear almost at once.
The cost to the family
Dave told viewers this was not a funny story with a happy ending. He said there was a real chance he would have to repay some or all of it from his own pocket. He does not blame the boy: “He’s only nine, he didn’t understand fully what a company card meant, or that a large number on the screen represented real money.”
ANOTHER News reported that a later video brought worse news: Dave said he was out of work and had 30 days to pay the whole sum back. No GoFundMe, he said. Meanwhile the channel’s store started offering shirts at $67 to $97, one of them a black tee reading “118K.”
That drew a backlash. ANOTHER News, citing Dexerto, said the channel acknowledged using “AI tools for design creation” and switched off comments after viewers turned “way too aggressive.” Some YouTubers doubt the story, and Dexerto says a viewer shared an email, supposedly from Dave, threatening unnamed channels with a libel suit. ANOTHER News stressed that every core figure comes from the father himself.
The gap in the system
Strip away the drama and the mechanics are mundane, ANOTHER News argued. Ad tools are designed so that starting a campaign takes moments, and a card stored without a limit or a second sign-off will pay for whatever a logged-in user clicks. Any child who has seen a parent do it once knows the whole routine. A hard budget ceiling on any ad account within a child’s reach, or a card that demands approval for new charges, would each have cut the damage to a sliver of $118,000.
Sources
- Nine-year-old runs up $118,000 bill on dad's corporate credit card advertising his Roblox YouTube channel | The Register
- A dad says his son, 9, spent $118,000 on YouTube ads | ANOTHER News
