How to spot it
- The offer appears at the moment of failure, never before it.
- The price is small and the currency is not money: coins, gems, energy, a bundle you already part-own.
- The difficulty rose sharply just before the offer, and falls again just after.
- A timer counts down on the offer itself, so the decision is made under a second deadline.
- The free option is present but quieter, smaller, or one tap further away.
Why it works on you
The moment of loss is the moment you will pay most to reverse it. That is the whole design: the same continue sold before the run would be worth far less. Adding a currency layer breaks the link to real money, and adding a countdown removes the pause in which you would notice. None of the three is deceptive alone; together they are engineered.
What to do
- Decide the number before you play, not while you are losing.
- Convert the currency back to money once, out loud. Six hundred gems is a real amount.
- If the offer has its own timer, that is two pressure techniques stacked, and worth declining on principle.
- On a child's device, turn off in-app purchases rather than relying on the child to decline at the worst possible moment.
Where the law stands
Selling to a player at the moment of loss is not banned as such, but it is heavily scrutinised where the charge was not genuinely authorised. The FTC's case against Epic Games over Fortnite is the clearest example: a $245 million settlement proposed in December 2022 and finalised in March 2023, over button layouts the FTC described as counterintuitive, inconsistent and confusing, which charged players on a single press. By July 2025 the FTC had sent more than $72 million of it back to consumers. Article 25 of the EU Digital Services Act covers manipulative interfaces on large platforms, and European consumer authorities have turned their attention to in-game virtual currencies specifically, on the ground that a currency layer obscures the real price.
This is a description of published regulation, not legal advice, and rules in this area have changed more than once. The sources below are the primary ones.
This site does it too, on purpose, with the trick removed. Every game offers a restart for nothing and an extra life for a dollar, the free option is the loud one, there is no timer on the offer, the price is in dollars rather than gems, and the life is real: it is granted only after the payment is verified, and it hands back the score you actually had.
Every game here offers exactly this