A 9-year-old YouTuber reportedly spent about $118,000 on YouTube advertisements promoting his Minecraft and Roblox videos after gaining access to a company credit card saved to his father’s Google account.

The unusual spending spree was described by the boy’s father, Dave, in a video posted to his son’s YouTube channel, Mighty Mike Plays. According to a report by Dexerto, the father said the charges accumulated over several weeks before being discovered by his employer.

The $118,000 figure, along with the circumstances surrounding the company credit card, has not been independently verified. However, YouTube users had already been reporting unusually long paid advertisements from the boy’s channel before the father publicly explained what had happened.

A $20 promotion reportedly spirals

Dave said the situation began innocently after Mike became frustrated that his gaming videos were receiving few views and subscribers.

His father agreed to help him spend about $20 promoting one of his videos through YouTube’s advertising system and showed him how to select an audience, set a budget and launch the campaign, according to Dexerto.

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Mike allegedly returned to the advertising controls later and began setting up additional promotions without his father’s knowledge. A company credit card belonging to Dave’s employer was already connected to the Google account being used.

Dave summarized his son’s apparent thinking as: “More money, more views.”

According to the father, the campaigns continued for roughly three weeks and eventually generated about $118,000 in charges before his company’s finance department noticed the spending.

Google allows advertisers to set their own campaign budgets. According to Google Ads documentation, advertisers choose an average daily budget and can change that amount at any time. For most campaigns, Google says spending can reach as much as twice the selected average daily budget on an individual day, subject to monthly spending limits tied to the budget selected by the advertiser.

Google also says some advertising accounts are subject to separate daily account limits, particularly newer accounts or those flagged for unusual activity, although such limits are not necessarily applied to every account. 

Viewers noticed the ads before the story went viral

There is independent evidence that Mighty Mike Plays was running an unusually aggressive advertising campaign before the alleged $118,000 bill became public.

On Sept. 1, a Reddit user reported receiving a roughly 14-minute advertisement consisting of a child playing Roblox and identified the channel as Mighty Mike Plays. The user said other Minecraft videos from the same channel also appeared to be running as advertisements. 

A day later, another post attracted thousands of responses after a viewer reported receiving a roughly 30-minute advertisement showing a child playing Minecraft. Other users said they had encountered similar ads from the channel.

Those reports appeared nearly two weeks before the father’s explanation began circulating widely, lending support to at least one part of the story: large numbers of people were genuinely being served lengthy gaming videos from Mighty Mike Plays as paid YouTube advertisements.

According to Dave, some of Mike’s promoted videos eventually accumulated hundreds of thousands of views.

Father says employer discovered the charges

Dave said he learned the scale of the problem after being called into a meeting involving company officials and finance staff over the advertising charges.

The father reportedly did not know at the time whether he would be required to repay the money or whether the incident would cost him his job. Dexerto noted that it could not independently verify the $118,000 total or the employer’s response. 

The case also raises questions about how a child was able to repeatedly increase advertising spending without the charges being noticed earlier by the account holder, employer, card issuer or Google’s automated systems.

For Mike, however, the seriousness of the situation appeared considerably simpler.

When his father asked whether he had anything to say about what happened, the 9-year-old replied:

Original article