When this happened to my son, rather than deleting everything and losing all his contacts and emails with his auntie etc etc, google just demanded I pay a bribe of 50 cents on a credit card, on the hilarious assumption that the only people in a family with access to CC are parents. At least this is how they did it back in the good old days.

>on the hilarious assumption that the only people in a family with access to CC are parents //

Hilarious? How do under-13s get banks to issue them credit cards? Presumably they only allow the payment from a CC connected to an account rather than a payment card (I assume payment gateways do that sort of differentiation).

Even if some under-13s can access and use a credit-card it seems likely to me that the vast majority would be blocked by such a system. I can see kids stealing cash from their parents, perhaps, but stealing when you know it's going to appear on their bank-statement?? Just to use YouTube? Then you need to be able to actually perform the payment; no-one else [that I know of] knows my CC password and it's certainly not written down anywhere.

I got a debit card when I got my first bank account at 10 years old in ~2001. I didn't pay for anything online with it until my mid teens (when I had a job), but I do remember having to use it to verify my account for the SecondLife teen grid.

Virtually all bank accounts come with debit cards nowadays, if your parents are forward thinking enough to set you up with a bank account then you could have a card very young.

I got a debit card somewhere around becoming a teenager. But it was probably a decade later that I got my first _credit_ card. They're quite different things.

In the UK under 18 you can't usually be held to a contract and so you don't have to pay back a credit card debt - this makes companies more than a little reluctant to lend to under 18s. You can't get a credit card until you're 18.

Citizens Advice (an established UK charity) say:

>"If you are under 18, it is a criminal offence for anyone to send you material inviting you to borrow money or obtain goods or services on credit or hire purchase. However, if you are over 14 but under 18, you can enter into a credit or hire purchase agreement if an adult acts as your guarantor."

Of course it might vary enormously in other countries but I'd be surprised if it was wildly different in USA?

For general interest, note that a transaction on a credit card is one of the explicit ways COPPA allows for verifying that someone is not a child. See §312.5(b)(2) in https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/312.5

Any hilarity should be taken up with congress.