Following its well documented crackdown on ad blockers, YouTube is now also cracking down on VPNs. Specifically, we’re talking about people using VPNs to fake their location in order to get a cheaper YouTube Premium subscription.
It turns out that quite a few people noticed that YouTube Premium’s pricing per month varies widely across countries, with some having much cheaper access to the service than others. They then used VPNs to pretend to be in the countries where it’s cheaper, and signed up there.
But the gig is up. YouTube has confirmed to TechCrunch that it can detect when a subscriber is lying about the signup country. When that happens, the system will prompt the user in question to update the billing information.
A YouTube spokesperson said:
To provide the most accurate plans and offers available, we have systems in place to determine the country of our users. In instances where the signup country does not match where the user is accessing YouTube, we’re asking members to update their billing information to their current country of residence.
Interestingly, a lot of people on Reddit have recently reported having their Premium subscriptions abruptly canceled by YouTube, and since they were all using the VPN trick described above, assumed that was the reason. YouTube did not however comment on whether it has terminated those subscriptions because of the users faking their locations, but it does kind of stand to reason that it would.
