British Boy Spends Real Cash on FarmVille Crop

(April 8) -- Debt can be a real farmer's worst enemy, but virtual farmers aren't safe either.

That's the lesson learned by an anonymous British 12-year-old. His mother said he was shocked to learn had wracked up £900 ($1,374) in debt buying accessories for his virtual farm in the popular Facebook game FarmVille.

"When I asked him why he did it he said that they had brought out 'good stuff that I wanted,' " his mother told the Guardian.

FarmVille, like most other Facebook games, is free to play, but it makes money by charging players for special in-game items that can only be purchased with real currency. And while the British preteen may be an extreme case, he certainly isn't alone among those willing to shell out cash for virtual goods. So-called "microtransactions" make big money on Facebook, and social games companies have attracted large video-game conglomerates and tech investors alike.

Zynga, the creator of FarmVille and other Facebook games, is a privately held company. However, a recent assessment by investment news blog Second Shares estimated Zynga to be worth about $5 billion. The company has come under fire both for cloning other games and for an incident in November when its advertisers were revealed to be scamming their players.

The mother of the 12-year-old said that she does not blame the credit card company, Facebook or Zynga, but that she does wish some extra security would have been in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening.