6-Year-Old Girl Hacks Mom’s Phone and Buys $250 Worth of Pokémon Gifts

Kids do the darnedest things — like use their parents’ fingerprints to unlock a phone and go on an online shopping tear.

Ashlynd Howell, a 6-year-old Arkansas girl, gave herself a special Christmas present this year by taking advantage of her mother, Bethany, while the exhausted mom was taking a nap on the couch, according to the Daily Mail. “We laid there, and two minutes into the movie, I fell asleep because I was wiped out,” Bethany told the publication. “On this occasion, my phone was sitting on the coffee table next to the couch,” she said.

That’s when little Ashlynd seized the opportunity to indulge in her love for all things Pokémon. The clever, mischievous kid picked up the smartphone and used her sleeping mom’s thumb to get past the phone’s ID lock! She then made a beeline to Amazon and ordered $250 worth of Pokémon toys. That’s a whole lot of Pikachu and Charizard!

Thanks to Amazon’s autofill feature, she was able to expediently checkout without having to actually input any information. Bethany is also a member of Amazon Prime, and her credit card details are attached to her account, making for a quick and easy checkout.

When Bethany looked at her Amazon account the next day, she was shocked to see the charge and immediately assumed she had been hacked, according to the Daily Mail. Then she noticed that the order was placed to her home address, and it clicked that her daughter had engaged in a little late-night shopping spree. Ashlynd was familiar with how to use the phone, after all, because her mom had given it to her before to keep her entertained with YouTube and Netflix. But, the mom says, “I didn’t know she knew what Amazon was.”

So Bethany confronted her little girl and asked if she’d been on her phone. “‘Yeah, Mommy, I was shopping,” Ashlynd told her mother, innocently. “Oh, you were?” her mom responded. She then called Amazon to make it aware of the unusual conundrum and was told that the company’s policy would allow her to return only four of the 13 products purchased, says the Daily Mail. Regardless, Bethany proceeded to let her daughter know that Santa was aware of what she’d done and that she’d only be able to keep some of the gifts (OK, maybe mom is a bit of a softie.).

Lesson learned? The next time Bethany decides to watch a movie with Ashlynd before bedtime, it’s probably best to keep the phone out of the precocious little girl’s reach.

This isn’t the first time an e-commerce site’s autofill feature has gotten a kid into hot water. In November, a teen from Pittsburgh “accidentally” charged $733 worth of Sephora goods on her mother’s credit card when she was shopping on the makeup retailer’s site. She proceeded to freak out in real-time in a series of Twitter videos that quickly went viral. It was another situation in which the mom — after recovering from her initial shock — let the kid keep some of the haul in a half-hearted “lesson.”

What would you do if your kid went on an online spending spree and left you with the bill? Tell us in the comments!

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