Kids bought $764,000 Ferrari and parents offered $1000

There are bad days to buy a Ferrari. Then when you come home from a business trip you discover that your $764,000 AUD supercar has been used as a playground.

Same thing happened with A ferrari 488 gtb The owner in Kunming, China, when four young boys decided the red supercar parked outside looked worth climbing into.

Surveillance footage shows children approaching the car with bamboo sticks, sitting on the roof and using Ferrari parts as slides.

For an owner who had never even scratched the car, it was a struggle to get it back. The 488 GTB cost them 3.6 million yuan (~$764,000), and the kids left it with scratches on several panels and a broken bumper.

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The master who tried to be fair

This is where the story gets even more interesting than yet another expensive parking lot incident.

The owner, identified only as Zhang, could have gone straight to an authorized Ferrari repairer. That route would cost around 100,000 yuan (~$21,000 AUD).

Instead, because the damage was done by children and because Zhang himself is a father, he opted to use local workshops and bring the bill down to $6,300 AUD. Still a worthwhile amount of money, but significantly less than what it usually costs to repair a Ferrari.

They then presented the receipts during police mediation and waited to see what the parents would offer, but they came back with 5,000 yuan (~$1,061 AUD) and did not bring the children to apologize in person.

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When forgiveness makes everything worse

The $1,000 offer is part of what turned a straightforward insurance headache into something people actually wanted to debate about online.

No one expects children to be personally held responsible for understanding the value of the 488 GTB. Children climb on things. But this is not the real story. The hard part to follow is that the parents apparently refused to cover the actual repair bill because Zhang had already gone out of his way to avoid the most expensive option available.

He specifically absorbed the inconvenience of local workshops to make the settlement manageable, and the response was actually a fraction of the amount he paid.

Armed with surveillance footage, police records and detailed repair receipts, Zhang prepared the paperwork to file a lawsuit. A lawyer quoted in local reporting said that guardians could be held liable for harm caused by children who lack civil capacity unless they could demonstrate that they had properly fulfilled their duty of supervision.

It is a different matter whether that argument will stand legal scrutiny or not. What is already clear is that the $1,000 counteroffer does not make the situation any easier to remedy. This made it quite difficult.