A 9-year-old spent $118,000 on YouTube ads for his Minecraft channel — using his dad's company card

A nine-year-old YouTube creator racked up $118,000 in ad charges on his father's corporate credit card over roughly three weeks — and YouTube's own ad platform had nothing in place to stop it. The boy, Mike Sarkisyan, runs a Minecraft and Roblox channel called Mighty Mike Plays. His father David found out during a company finance meeting when management presented him with a printout of the transactions.

How it happened

David Sarkisyan set up a $20 YouTube ad campaign himself to give his son's channel a boost, then walked Mike through exactly how the targeting and promotion tools worked. The card details were saved to a shared Google account with no spending cap. Mike, not fully grasping that he was spending real money from his father's employer, kept running campaigns. By the time David was called into his boss's office, the bill had climbed to six figures.

The spend generated an estimated 689,828 views and around 9,320 new subscribers — working out to roughly $12.66 per subscriber, per VGC. David's job status and whether he must personally reimburse the company remain unresolved.

The platform gap

YouTube Ads policy does not, on its face, prohibit what happened here, according to Dexerto. There are no child-specific spending guardrails, no parental consent gates, and no mandatory budget caps on ad campaigns. Child creators operate on standard YouTube — not YouTube Kids — so none of the platform's minor-oriented restrictions apply to the Ads tool.

This sits in a notable regulatory gap. The FTC settled with Google in 2014 for $19 million over unauthorized purchases made by children on Google Play, requiring express consent before billing. That ruling covered Google Play, not YouTube Ads — leaving the advertising side of the platform largely unaddressed by enforceable rules.

What the family is doing now

David has been candid about where the blame sits. "I'm the adult in this situation," he said in a video he posted about the incident. "I should have set limits, used a separate card, or done literally anything other than what I did." The family plans to remove saved payment details, set spending limits, and activate parental controls. Mike's channel is paused pending review, and he has lost access to his iPad and PlayStation 5.

The confession video itself crossed one million views in under 48 hours — a reminder that, whatever else happens, David Sarkisyan knows how to run a campaign.