Mr. A, who has a child in grade 6 of elementary school, was surprised to receive a notification that his credit card usage limit was recently exceeded.



When she pulled out her credit card bills to find out what was going on, she discovered something even more absurd.



A child who borrowed an iPhone to play a game paid about 4.26 million won worth of game items over 17 days in the Apple App Store.



Surprised, Mr. A requested a refund from Apple, but Apple refunded only about 310,000 won, and maintained the position that it could not refund 3.95 million won excluding this.



According to Mr. A, Apple did not specifically explain the reason for the non-refundable process during this process.



Mr. A requested mediation from the Content Dispute Mediation Committee, but Apple continued to insist on 'no additional refund' and mediation was not made.



In a press call today (the 1st), Mr. A said, "I submitted a family relationship certificate (where the child and Mr. A appeared) and a payment statement that had never made a game-related purchase before, but Apple continued to repeat the same position." .



In response, Apple explained the general process by stating that it was guiding the refund process through its website, but did not provide a detailed explanation of this case, stating that the full refund differs from case to case.



The two major app markets, Google Play Store and Apple App Store, guide the process of requesting a refund if it is confirmed that the payment was made by someone other than the account holder, such as an underage child, but the specific criteria for judging this are not disclosed.



The number of cases in which underage children pay in the app market with their parent's account, leading to consumer disputes, is on the rise.



According to the case book published by the Content Dispute Mediation Committee at the beginning of every year, the number of applications for dispute mediation due to content payment by minors increased significantly from 727 cases in 2018 and 813 cases in 2019 to 2,152 cases in 2020.



Person A said, "At the moment, there is no proper way to respond other than litigation.