The Punjab boy would tell his parents he is studying online on his father’s phone but instead would play PUBG Mobile for hours.
Ateenage boy in Punjab lost nearly Rs 16 lakh from his parents’ bank accounts on the popular battle royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, better known as PUBG. The whopping sum of money was spent on buying in-app items, including artillery, passes for tournaments, and virtual ammunition over a month’s duration. The parents have claimed the huge amount was set aside as savings for the teenager’s father’s medical expenses.
The 17-year-old Khagar-based boy told his parents that he would use the mobile phone for studying online. Instead, he was playing PUBG Mobile excessively on the smartphone of his father, according to a report by The Tribune. When making online transactions, bank account details and card details are mostly saved on the smartphone for later use by parents. The boy knew that his father’s bank account is linked to the smartphone, which he used excessively over a month’s period to buy various PUBG Mobile items.
According to the boy’s father, he would make transactions on PUBG Mobile and delete the messages from the bank, because of which the debits remained unknown to them. Parents came to know about the transactions only after they reviewed the bank statements. Teenager’s father told The Tribune he has an ailment and that the huge sum of money was saved for his treatment. Over and above the money his father saved for medical expenses, the teenager also emptied his mother’s provident fund and his own account.
The boy not only did make transactions from three different accounts, belonging to his father, mother, and him, but he would also shuffle money between the three accounts to avoid parents from suspecting any changes in the account balance. “After we received details from the bank, I found that on several occasions, he shuffled amount from one bank to another to avoid nil balance. He was using his mother’s phone for quite some time and she was not much vigilant to notice this,” the father told the publication.
After the startling incident, the father has made the boy work at a scooter repair shop. “I just can’t let him sit idle at home and cannot give him a mobile phone even for studying. He is working at a scooter repair shop so that he realises how hard it is to earn money. I am hopeless now as the money was saved for my son’s future.”
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PUBG Mobile outshone other games to have raked in the highest revenue in the months of May and June, according to Sensor Tower. The main source of this revenue is mostly the purchases made on the app for Unknown Cash (UC) that is used to buy items such as artillery, fresh ammunition, and passes to tournaments.
The hit battle royale game has also been cited as one of the reasons teenagers have died by suicide over a long time. Due to its ill effects on children’s physical and psychological health, PUBG recently got banned by Pakistan.
