Think business accounts. The name on the card might be some agent of the company but they're not directly responsible for paying the debt. The business is responsible for the debt.
> Over here minors can't enter into debt contracts like credit cards
In basically all of the western world minors can enter into debt contracts, but are generally not seen as particularly creditworthy.
No, that's not legally permitted in many places. I was under impression that minors can't enter into debt contracts anywhere in EU, but that, too, was an incorrect assumption.
https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2017/mapping-minimum-ag...
I grew up in one of these "not under 18 even with parental consent" countries, so that coloured my view of the matter.
Minors can't get a credit card in the UK. In fact, it's one of the government approved age verification methods for that exact reason.
AWS doesn't check if your credit card will be able to handle a $5k charge before letting you rack that up, and in fact AWS doesn't support setting any spending limit.
You just have to put in any valid credit card at all when you sign up, use AWS, and at the end of the month you'll have a bill. At no point does your credit card limit or a spending limit enter into things.
If a vendor makes a $20 oopsy, it's not worth the vendor's time or yours to track down their phone number, find that just the phone number section of their website is broken, acquire it elsewhere, see that it recently changed or is otherwise no longer in service, go to their website and interact with the cheapest chatbot solution they could find which somehow costs more than unfiltered Sonnet 4.6, be greeted by 3 help pages which have literally nothing to do with the problem at hand, go through the entire dialogue tree and see that it's useless, ask to be connected to an agent, which spawns a secret dialogue option informing you that you can call 555-5555 to speak to a human being, sit and wait for a voice prompt recorded at half-speed which feels the need to repeat every single choice and interaction back to you, navigate the entire phone dialogue tree, try various permutations of "representative" and swearing to see if there's an escape hatch, be redirected back to the website, ... <magic> ..., somehow eventually connect to a real human being, have your request denied, go back to step one and find a better informed representative, have the charge reversed, notice that the reversal hasn't applied even a month later, go back to step one, find a representative who will actually press the reversal button instead of just saying they did to juice their metrics, and come back several more times over the next year as an automated system repeatedly flags the associated purchase as not being paid in full (since the charge was reversed).
Or...I can send my bank the timestamped dashcam footage of me entering a parking garage, their prices and policies, and me exiting the parking garage, tell my bank what the right charge should have been, let the garage dispute that if they really think I'm wrong, and wind up having the entire charge reversed instead of just the delta I asked for.
I'm sure your vendor is one of the good ones, but my tolerance for bullshit from the rest is pretty low nowadays, and I won't finish going through the official process if it's too onerous. Somebody got a pat on the back saving $5 for the call I never successfully placed, and the business lost $20 on top of the actual refund in chargeback fees.
There's also the issue that it's usually a breach of the contract to allow someone else (i.e. not named in the contract) to use your card.
In theory once the child grows up and shocked that their credit score is ruined, they can file a police report to wipe the debt, but that also means their parents will go to jail, a large risk considering they're likely not in a good physical/mental health in the first place.
Other countries solved this by either having national ID or a working KYC system.
Parent/Legal Guardian Identity Verification To confirm your identity, we’ll ask you to take:
A live selfie of yourself, and
A photo of your own ID document (Valid Passport or valid UK/ROI Drivers Licence)