A bizarre drama played out on YouTube this past week, when a channel called Mighty Mike Plays posted a video explaining how nine-year-old “Mighty Mike” apparently got a hold of his father Dave’s company card and spent $118,000 on a YouTube ad campaign.

However, the story immediately appeared to have a number of holes, and within a few days there were too many red flags for influencers, who had initially boosted the story’s reach, to ignore.

Mighty Mike Plays, which features Roblox and Minecraft videos, was created in June of 2024 but only started posting videos in August of this year.

Over the past month, the channel has uploaded 175 long and short form videos — a considerable number for a child of nine.

When it suddenly started reaching the front page of YouTube ads, people began to comment that Mike was going to get in trouble with his father. They were, in fact, being played by the marketing.

On September 14, the channel released a video titled “Message from Dad… Mighty Mike Plays is Over.”

In the video, Dave speaks while Mike plays Minecraft. He states that Mike had spent $118,000 on the YouTube ad campaign and worst of all that the charges were on his company card and now he might get fired.

Dave didn’t explain why he would ever use a company card for anything but company purchases or how using the card even for a $20 ad campaign — as he stated was his intention — wasn’t illegal, but no red flags outside of this were obvious yet.

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