Parents! You Might Get a Refund for All the Nonsense Your Kid Bought While Using Your iPhone

I mean, SOMEONE (besides you) has to be held responsible, right?

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Doing what any enterprising parent would do, you leverage the multi-purpose power of your smartphone to turn it into a babysitter from time to time. But what to do when Junior runs up your credit card bill with in-app purchases?

Well, a bunch of you sued Apple. And it looks like justice may be yours.

If your lovable little troublemaker bought countless Tiny Tower Bux while you were in the mall bathroom working through a gastrointestinal argument with last night’s ethnic delicacies, you may be entitled to iTunes Store credit or even a cash refund.

There are a few qualifiers accompanying the deal. For starters, according to the settlement, “Qualified Apps consist of all apps from the App Store in the games category with an age rating of 4+, 9+, or 12+ that offer in-app purchases of consumable game currency.”

Junior has to have bought said consumable game currency without your knowledge. If you entered your iTunes password to allow Junior to make in-app purchases, you’re out, in other words. And if you’ve already received a refund from Apple, you aren’t eligible for this (that’s pretty obvious, right?).

As far as your options go, you can either get a flat $5 iTunes credit (you’d use this option if your mischievous bundle of joy bought less than $5 worth of currency) or you can get an iTunes credit equal to the total amount your offspring spent within a 45-day period, minus any refund already received.

But you want cash, right? In that case, you’ll either have to no longer have an iTunes account or that little DNA-sharing scamp of yours must have run up more than $30 worth of purchases.

You can check out the settlement site here, which includes a tool for looking up qualifying apps and additional information about how to submit your claim.

Apple Is Now Refunding People Whose Kids Bought iPhone Crap [Kotaku]