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Boy, 4, presses dad's iPhone, wins £500 eBay auction

Ouch!

A four year-old boy bid £500 for - and won - a bookplate signed by JK Rowling - while playing with his dad's iPhone.

His father, James Hinton, 30, had been browsing eBay for signed books, when a call of nature intervened. He put his phone down on the sofa, and went to the toilet. Thirty seconds later, he returned to find his son Benji had pressed the "Buy it Now" option and that the auction had ended.

"I asked him what he had done and he said, 'Pressed some buttons, Daddy'," Hinton told The Sun. "I could have died — it meant I was committed to paying £500 for something I didn't want. And Benji doesn't even like Harry Potter!"

Hinton, from Newbury, Berks, has emailed the seller, to ask for mercy.

Children, huh!

Benji's dad was naive, rather than stupid. The same perhaps cannot be said for the people who recently paid up to $399 for an iPhone games app, called "Zits and Giggles", priced originally at 99c.

The self-gougers were unwitting participants in a fascinating experiment conducted by two games developers, to "basically to prove the App Store is kind of shit for most things".

So how did they get on? Rather well, as this story, from the website FingerGaming, shows.

Following the publicity, Apple has removed Zits and Giggles from the App Store.

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