A dad says his son, 9, spent $118,000 on YouTube ads

A father says his 9-year-old son turned a $20 YouTube ad into a $118,000 bill on the father’s company credit card.

The father’s account

The family runs the Minecraft and Roblox channel Mighty Mike Plays. According to the father, Dave, he showed his son how to promote a video with a $20 ad after the boy complained that nobody was watching. In the video, quoted by VGC, he said: “I think I put like $20 into a small ad campaign.”

The card was saved to the ad account and approved every new campaign the boy launched. In Dave’s words: “Anyway, turns out a 9-year-old gets access to an ad account with no limits. And the credit card, it just says approved every single time, no matter what.”

The charges ran for about three weeks. He found out when he was called into the office for a meeting with his manager and staff from corporate and finance, who showed him a breakdown of ad spend covering that period.

What happened next

In a later video, Dave said he had lost his job, had 30 days to repay the full amount, and that the family would not start a GoFundMe. Then the channel’s store began selling shirts priced from $67 to $97, including a black tee printed with “118K.”

Dexerto reports the channel acknowledged using “AI tools for design creation” and turned off comments after viewers became “way too aggressive” about it. Several YouTubers have questioned whether the story is real, and Dexerto reports that an email a viewer says the father sent threatened to sue unnamed channels for libel. The core figures all come from the father’s own account.

The mechanism is the useful part

Whatever the full truth turns out to be, the mechanism in the story is ordinary. A saved card with no spending cap and no second approval step will pay for anything a logged-in user clicks. Ad platforms are built to make launching a campaign fast, and a child who has watched a parent do it once has seen the whole procedure.

The father’s own sentence names the gap: an ad account with no limits. A hard budget cap on any ad account a child can reach, and a card that asks for approval on new charges, would each have stopped the bill at a fraction of $118,000.