$120K spent advertising a kid’s Minecraft channel is suspicious. The initial flag should just have been for “card not normally used suddenly spending a shit-ton of money—does this look legit?” After that, a ten-second check of what was being advertised would have shown that something was fishy.
Seems to me that this is a dual fail. The father should have monitored his kid more closely and not used his company card for this, but Google should have noticed the unusual spending pattern and flagged it somehow—I mean, it looks like something someone might do using a stolen card, in which case Google might never have gotten its money, if you need a self-interested reason why they should have been keeping a more careful eye on this.
Part of the problem here is that too many people live to work, instead of the other way around. Once they retire, they have no idea what to do with themselves and take the least-effort path to occupy their time. Which makes them perfect targets for the addictive aspects of social media.
Maybe what we need to do is flood Facebook and Instagram and all the rest with material about the rewards of volunteering for charity.
(Sometimes I’m almost thankful my mother is a technophobe.)