[JoeD]

Steve: It was "accidental" in that he likely didn't know he was spending real money to acquire the items. Too many games on the app store make it less than obvious that real money is involved and if you're in the window of just having entered your password (which most people are when they download a free app to let their kid play for a few minutes) the costs will quickly mount up.

It might be that where you spend coins earned in the game to buy new ammo/weapons there's an extra button that lets the player seemingly get them without needing any coins. Little do they realise their parents are footing the bill.

Apple in one of the more recent updates (last year?) added a way to turn off in app purchases totally or to require you enter your password for every purchase. Those should imo be defaults. Safe by default and let the user loosen up restrictions if they want.

However, if they persist with the current defaults then they should imo refund anyone who has this occur at least the first time it happens. Provide them with instructions on how to turn in app off or have it always ask for a password, then if it happens again they can be less generous with refunds. Although I'd hope they'd still see sense when someone runs up a totally insane bill especially when we're talking about virtual items where there should be no end cost to apple or the developer for giving the refund (although apple may be less than nice and still keep their 30% which would be at the developers expense and a little nasty imo. I hope they only enforce that for developers who are malicious or have deliberately mislead players)

For what it's worth, I'm sure we've been saying this exact thing was bound to happen shortly after apple added iap to the device. I expect the same will occur with kindles when parents let their kids read a book on it and don't notice they've found their way into the store and are "exploring" all the books on it. Although IAP on the iPhone/iPad is much more likely to have it occur due to the way everything is setup. Still Amazon should provide a pin or pass option you can enable to prevent buying without your consent, regardless of how good they are with refunds.