PUBG Mobile remains a popular game on mobile devices during the social isolation period in India caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Although it is a free game that doesn’t require any payment to experience in-game features, PUBG Mobile itself has many in-game transactions to purchase items for characters. In particular, the skin system for characters and weapons always makes many gamers crave.
Many of these items can only be obtained through events and sometimes require players to deposit money to participate. Since most PUBG Mobile players in India are teenagers who cannot earn money, they cannot acquire the ability to own rare skins in the game. This is also the reason why this 17-year-old student spent a total of 1,600,000 Indian Rupees, equivalent to about 500 million VND from his mother’s bank account for PUBG Mobile.
According to the boy’s parents, this gamer accessed three bank accounts belonging to them. Typically, the boy would tell his parents that he needed their phone to “attend online classes” while in reality, he was using it to play PUBG Mobile. Unfortunately, this gamer not only recharged his own account but also “gifted to friends’ accounts.
After each purchase, this gamer deleted the messages from the bank to conceal his actions. The 17-year-old gamer’s parents never knew about this until they saw the bank statements. “He used his mother’s mobile phone to carry out all transactions and deleted the messages related to the debited amounts from the account,” the father said.
The father of this gamer is a government employee with a medical history. After this incident, the 17-year-old’s parents required him to work in a repair shop under strict supervision to prevent him from spending too much time on PUBG Mobile. Recently, people in India have been boycotting Chinese products and applications, and PUBG Mobile is one of the targeted items.
PUBG Mobile is developed by Tencent, a Chinese company. The game is considered by the Indian government to be addictive, violent, and harmful to children in the country. A total of 59 Chinese applications, including TikTok, have been banned so far.