How to Stop a Game Charging Your Card at Midnight

A charge at midnight is almost never the game doing something clever. It is a card already attached to an account the child is signed into, and a confirmation prompt the child learned to swipe past. Two settings stop that. A third one — knowing what the settings do not cover — stops the argument afterwards.

Royal Match is a reasonable example because its own listing is honest about selling things. The controls, though, are not in the game.

What the game is sellingCoin, boosters, and the level you almost beat

“Collect loads of coins in bonus levels!”
Royal Match, description supplied by Dream Games.
“Lots of powerful boosters await for you to unlock them!”
Same description.
Store image of a match three puzzle board mid level with a twelve second timer and a goal counter reading 35 of 40, with no shop or prices visible
Store image supplied by the publisher: a puzzle board mid-level with a twelve-second timer running and a goal counter reading 35 of 40. No shop, no prices and no currency in the frame — which is accurate marketing. The selling happens at the moment a level is lost, not on the store page.

That framing matters for what you are actually protecting against. The purchase prompt appears when a child is frustrated, in the second after losing, with a countdown still running. There is no version of settings that makes that moment fair; the only defence is that the money is not reachable.

The two switchesApple’s own words, quoted

“Tap Ask to Buy, then turn on Require Purchase Approval.”
Apple Support, on approving what your child can purchase and download.

That is the whole mechanic: “With Ask to Buy, your child needs to ask for permission to download or purchase an app or make an in-app purchase – regardless of the app’s age rating.” Regardless of the age rating is the part parents get wrong — a game rated for children can still contain a shop, and the gate is on payment, not on content.

The second switch is less glamorous and does more work. Apple states it as a requirement, not advice: “It’s important that your child has their own Apple Account, and isn’t sharing an account with anyone else (for example, another family member).” On a shared account the child is you. Every purchase they make is authorised by your session, your card and your face-id prompt that they have watched you pass a thousand times.

What “approved” looks like when you are asleep

Apple describes the flow plainly: “If you approve, sign in to your Apple Account to make the purchase, or authenticate with Face ID.” and “If you dismiss the request or don’t approve within 24 hours, the child will need to make the request again.” The failure mode is not a hole in the system. It is a parent half asleep, tapping the thing that makes the phone stop buzzing.

The three things it does not coverWhy a charge can still appear

Apple’s own exception, quoted

“If a child redownloads their own purchase, installs an update, or uses a redemption code, you won’t receive a request to approve or decline.”

Open the child’s purchase history once and read what is already on the account. Anything in there can come back without asking. If an old game with a shop lives in that list, delete it — deleting does not remove it from history, which is why you check first.

Two more: a gift or redemption code spent is a purchase you will not be asked about, and “in-app credit” already bought last month gets spent silently, because spending a balance is not a new charge.

If the charge has already happenedThe route, in order

  1. Do not delete the app first.The receipt and the purchase history are the evidence, and they live on the account, not in the icon.
  2. Go to the reporting site, not the game.Apple’s step is blunt: “Sign in to reportaproblem.apple.com.” Use the account that was charged.
  3. If the charge is still pending, wait.Apple says so directly: “If the charge is pending, you can’t request a refund yet.” This is why the request looks broken on day one and works on day three.
  4. Then allow for the wait.“Wait 24 to 48 hours for an update on your request.” Keep the confirmation email.
  5. Cancel anything that renews.“If you were charged for a subscription that you no longer want, you can also cancel the subscription.” A game is usually one-off purchases; a video or VPN app bundled with it may not be.
  6. Change the account situation before the next one.Switching the child onto their own account is the fix. Turning Ask to Buy on is only half of it if the account is shared.
Sources

  1. The Apple sentences — three Apple Support articles on Ask to Buy, parental controls and requesting a refund, retrieved directly from Apple and quoted word for word after normalising quotation marks and its typographic apostrophes.
  2. The game sentences — the app description Dream Games supplies for its own store listing, retrieved from the store’s public catalogue interface (age rating 12+, in-app purchases present) and checked character by character.
  3. One store image — supplied by the publisher; the caption lists what is on screen, including the timer and the goal counter, and what is absent.
  4. Our own reading — the ordering of the recovery steps and the “deleting the app destroys your evidence” point. Not vendor guidance, and no refund was requested for this article.

The game is listed on our games hub. Two earlier pieces cover the neighbouring questions: how to turn off in-app purchases on a child’s iPhone, and setting a spending cap the game cannot override.

Written by the Dlzer editorial desk. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Dream Games or Apple. Names and marks belong to their owners; quoted lines are each company’s own statements about its products, and naming a game is not a judgement of it.