Caveat emptor! Pandemic, Streaming Services, and Scams

This pandemic forced many of us to stay home. It won't be long when indoors before you start looking for ways to fend off boredom. The easiest way to do that is to avail of video and music streaming services. Youtube has both video and music but it is riddled with ads. For truly premium, uninterrupted visual and aural feast you have Netflix and Spotify. But they will cost you.

So come the services that promise to provide long-term (annual) HD Netflix and Premium Spotify accounts for the price of coffee. Just search in Facebook Marketplace for sellers of such accounts.Use search terms like Netflix Buy&Sell Accounts or Netflix Premium Accounts.

But they normally use a group account to avail of the lower fees per subscriber. For example Netflix's Premium account costs P549 for 5 user profiles (4 screens watching at a time). Effectively, each user will just cost P137.25 per month. If they can pass this for P150-P200, then they have profits ranging from P51-P251 per group account. 

The same modus applies to Premium Spotify which costs just P194 for up to 6 accounts. They resell for P100 for three months. And Premium Spotify is free for the first three months. Do the math to know their profits.

But how legit are they?

Netflix and Spotify (and the other services as well) view the master accounts as legit. They got their money after all. It is the downstream reselling that can be problematic.

I tell you, you will get your account. You will be able to use it for as long as these 'resellers' wish. After all, they control the master account which determines the sub-accounts under them as in Spotify, or the master password, as in Netflix. There is nothing that prevents these 'resellers' from cancelling your sub-account and reselling it again.

Caveat emptor!