Tencent Holdings reported that a 13-year-old girl may have faked her age when she registered on Quanmin Karaoke, a live-broadcast app the company owns. The controversy arose when the girl issued debit payments for gifts to a performer using her mother's smartphone.
China Daily reported that Tencent's public relations department disclosed that the girl remitted debit payments of over 250,000 yuan to a performer named Yang Guang, with daily payments ranging between 1,900 yuan to 9,500 yuan daily.
As is customary with users of live-broadcast apps in China, users have the option to issue virtual gifts that are convertible to cash, making it a popular choice for performers nowadays. Other performers can also ask for money directly via private message.
In the current case, chat records show that Yang has asked the girl to send money on two occasions--one for 5,000 yuan and another for 20,000 yuan. The girl's mother received no text messages from the bank concerning the debit transactions, which she suspects were deleted by her daughter.
Now, Tencent is considering the possibility on whether the girl registered using a fake age, as Quanmin Karaoke's data shoes that her account is registered as 28 years old instead of her real age so that she can send virtual gifts. The data also shows that she registered her surname as "Han," not "Su," her real one.
Tencent vows to negotiate a refund once everything has been cleared, but for now the company is calling for the mother to come forward and verify whether the payments were made with her consent, considering that she left her smartphone to her daughter for leisure purposes.
Currently, Tencent does not require user to register their real names in any of its apps, but the issue hopes to encourage the company to push further with its plan to provide parents with a platform where they could monitor their children's activity when using its apps.