Five-year-old boy finds porn in refurbished Nintendo 3DS

Nintendo is usually linked to happy memories of playing family-friendly games, but recent events have proven that you might have to be careful when buying a device. According to The Daily Mail, a five-year-old, who got a refurbished Nintendo 3DS for Christmas, discovered nine pornographic images on the device. The console was bought from a US GameStop retailer.

The child’s father had purchased the device without any knowledge of the pornographic images that would be later found on it. In an interview with 9News, Mark Giles, the father, said he had immediately called the retailer.

When he recieved the 3DS and saw the images, the son, Braydon, was  confused by the pictures and handed the device over to his brother, Bryton. Bryton told 9News, _“He said that he didn’t take these pictures so I went over to these pictures and I see two people in a bed. I told my dad and I said dad this has porn on it and he got up and went right to the phone.”
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A refurbished model may not be as family-friendly as you think

GameStop released a statement to 9News, saying: “GameStop is currently researching this situation. We have a rigorous quality control process in place to ensure that existing content is removed from all devices before they are re-sold.__" It added, “Out of millions of transactions each year, ones like this happen very rarely. Our number one priority is to make this right for our customer.”

While the family has been given a brand new Nintendo 3DS by GameStop, the father says that he is more concerned about his son’s well-being. “You can’t unsee this,” he told 9News. “He’s five-years-old. Maybe when he’s 18 or 20 maybe he won’t know anything about it but he’s not going to forget about it tomorrow.”

This mostly happened because GameStop didn’t go over the device properly. A refurbished device is mostly one that has been returned by a previous owner due to some defect and has been completely repaired. While refurbished devices are usually as good as new, GameStop apparently failed to check the device’s memory and clean it out.

The 3DS is Nintendo’s latest attempt at a handheld device. While the hardware is a big improvement over the original DS, the main selling points of the 3DS are the bigger screens and the ability to show things in 3D without needing special glasses. It does this using a parallax barrier. The depth of 3D can be adjusted or disabled with a slider on the top screen. This basically gives both screens unique functions, with one showing things in 3D, and the other screen working as an extended controller thanks to its touchscreen capabilities. Other major additions to this iteration of the DS include the analog stick near the d-pad, a motion sensor similar to that found on the Wii,  two outer cameras that can take 3D pictures, along with a front-facing camera that takes normal pictures.

Parents here in India can rest easy, though; GameStop doesn’t have any stores in the country.