YouTube Stalks People Who Subscribe to Premium Using VPN
YouTube has been experimenting with ways to disable ad blockers for some time now, and is now going after its own subscribers. In particular, if you used a VPN to purchase YouTube Premium at a lower price than is available where you actually live, Google is after you.
In a statement to TechCrunch, the company said the following: “To provide the most accurate plans and offers available, we have systems in place to determine our users’ country. In cases where the country of registration does not match the location where the user accesses YouTube, we ask members to update their payment information with their current country of residence.” The announcement followed messages that users posted on Reddit that their YouTube Premium subscriptions had been cancelled. suddenly canceled without warning.
YouTube Premium plans vary depending on your market. For example, while the service costs $13.99 in the US, it costs the equivalent of $1.54 per month in India.
Reddit users who contacted customer service said agents told them their plans were canceled because they had “moved” to another region. One UK redditor who signed up for YouTube Premium with a Ukrainian IP address said they were told they would need to sign up for a new plan with a UK card, increasing the fee from £2.30 per month to £12.99 sterling per month. month.
“I confirm that this is a fight against cheap VPN subscriptions,” the Redditor wrote. “Yes…”
YouTube has not directly confirmed that it has canceled subscriptions for using a VPN during registration, although the company told PCMag that it has “initiated cancellation of premium memberships for accounts that were identified as having falsified country of registration data.”
While the decision to force people to pay full price for Premium follows a months-long campaign against ad blocking, YouTube Premium also offers additional services, including video downloads and access to YouTube Music Premium.