A young gamer has allegedly managed to rack up $20,000 (£16,186) in charges on their parents credit card. The cause? Twitch donations. According to a recent post on the Twitch subreddit from a desperate parent, their "minor child" gave away the eye-watering sum over the course of 17 days to various streamers.
As I'm sure most of you probably know, Twitch is primarily an entirely free platform. Viewers can watch streamers whenever they want, and have a great time doing it. However, streamers are dependent on donations from fans so that they can afford to invest time into doing what they do. Most people who frequent Twitch have a handful of streamers that they'll regularly donate to.
There are a number of ways to do this. The most common are tiered monthly subscriptions, which provides your favourite streamer with a reliable source of income for as long as you decide to keep the payments. Obviously, the higher your subscription, the more "perks" you might find yourself with access to - depending on the streamer.
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It's also possible to drop one-time donations. You can, if you so choose, throw an unlimited amount of cash at a streamer of your choice in the form of a gift. That's what our young Twitch superfan decided to do, going from the post shared by a clearly distraught parent looking for help.
"My minor child spent almost $20k using a debit card on subscriptions & donations, cleaning out my bank accounts without my knowledge or permission," terrikgm explained to the people of Reddit. "Years of savings gone in 17 days."
The parent added that they'd attempted to contact Twitch for help, but hadn't had a response in over two weeks. They've also heard nothing from Amazon, the behemoth company that owns Twitch.
A number of helpful folk on the thread agreed that the best way forward would be to contact their bank directly and report these transactions as fraudulent. They were, after all, allegedly done without the knowledge or consent of either parent. Hopefully that will be enough for the bank to be able to begin the process of getting the money back from where it was sent.
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This will, of course, put the streamers the kid donated to in a really crappy position. While some of the more successful streamers out there certainly wouldn't miss a few hundred dollars, there are definitely more streamers that really rely on every donation they receive. Sadly, things like this do happen a lot on Twitch, and the service does advise its streamers to give it a while before spending any money made via donations.
According to the parent, the kid donated to an NBA player and three other "super popular" streamers. Hopefully nobody is left too high and dry by the situation, and the parents can get their savings back.
Featured Image Credit: Twitch