Chinese Boy With Leukemia Spends Mom’s $23,000 Treatment Money on Mobile Game

The mother, identified as Lai Donghong, found out about the situation when she was about to pay for her son’s medical bills, but discovered that she had no money left in her account, according to Beijing Evening News.

After finding out her account had no money left, Lai, a migrant worker, immediately went to the bank to get a statement for her account, as translated by Daily Mail. The statement showed someone made five to six transactions in one month alone, and other previous transactions with sum of 8,000 yuan ($1,271) each.

With help from police officers, she found out that someone sent her savings money to someone with an account holder name of “King of Glory.” Lai, after hearing the name of the account, realized that her son, Taotao, was the one who used up the money on the mobile game.

The boy, while speaking with the reporters from Beijing Evening News, said that he transferred his mother’s money from WeChat to his own social media account before using the money on his mobile game, which is developed by Tencent.

He told reporters that he remembered seeing his mother using the money transfer feature of WeChat and copied the procedure to do the transaction. However, Taotao didn’t actually know that the numbers presented on the screen were real money digits.

Luckily, after reaching out to Tencent, Lai managed to retrieve two-thirds of the money that Taotao used on “King of Glory” when she told the company about what happened. It was also said in the report that she had racked up around 499,000 yuan ($79,291) in debt ever since her son was diagnosed with leukemia back in May 2017.

Many young people in China are getting addicted to mobile games, particularly Tencent’s “King of Glory.” In October last year, one woman had reportedly gone blind in one eye after playing the game seven to eight hours per day.

Featured image via YouTube / Cambo VDO (Left), Beijing Evening News (right)