Toddler Spends $2k on Accidental Walmart Shopping Spree Using Mom's Phone

Toddler Spends $2k on Accidental Walmart Shopping Spree Using Mom's Phone
A baby plays with mobile phone while his twin brother drinks juice as they attend the children's Festival Of Twins, in Kiev, on August 11, 2018. Getty images

Parents Pramod and Madhu Kumar were surprised when they received an endless stream of Walmart furniture deliveries which they later learned was from an accidental Walmart shopping spree order of their 22-month-old screen-savvy toddler.

Ayaansh, almost two years old, managed to access his mom's full cart on the Walmart website and completed the check-out for an order amounting to approximately $2,000 worth of furniture items.

The parents did not know about the transaction until the packages arrived. Pramod and Madhu started asking each other and their two older children who made the orders.

Toddler shopped for the parents

According to Pramod, the family recently moved to their home in New Jersey last year, and his wife, Madhu, had been doing online shopping. She viewed some things on Walmart and added to the cart what she liked.

She did not intend to purchase all the stuff. She just added them to the cart and decide later which ones to check out. "But then she put the phone down, and somehow my son managed to get the phone," the husband said.

Ayaansh, innocently playing on his mom's phone, somehow accessed mom's Walmart cart and accidentally completed the orders, paving the way for packages to be delivered one after the other.

"We have a bunch of packages. Like today, there are two packages just sitting outside of our house," said Pramod.

Some of the packages were big enough to fit the door. Among the things that Ayaansh bought on his accidental Walmart shopping spree were accent chairs, flower stands, and some household items purchased in multiple items.

"He's so little, he's so cute, we were laughing that he ordered all this stuff," his mom told NBC New York.

The couple plans to wait for all the deliveries to be done and then drive the items back to their local Walmart to return them. Walmart assured the couple that they would receive a full refund on the purchased items.

The parents, however, plans to keep some of the purchased items as a reminder of Ayaansh's first shopping spree.

How the toddler completed a transaction

The parents wondered how their 22-month old son was able to complete the transaction. Online shopping requires going through some options such as multiple questions and confirmation and reconfirmation on the chosen item before completing the order. "So I was really surprised to see how he was able to complete the whole transaction," the father said.

They later learned that Ayaansh knows his way around a phone. He was able to close the calendar app of an NBC New York reporter's phone, send an email to the reporter's mother and comb through the contacts.

The family thinks that he learned these things watching his two older siblings shop online, work or go to school from home.

His dad said they learned a good lesson from the experience. They will put up tough passcodes or face recognition so Ayaansh will find the phone in a locked condition.

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