People can buy accounts for a significantly smaller price

May 4, 2015 13:13 GMT  ·  By

For Netflix viewers who want to enjoy the benefits of a Premium account, but are unwilling to pay the full price, third parties are offering significant discounts for "lifetime accounts" sold on eBay.

Australian Netflix enthusiasts are given the possibility to buy a Premium account for just $8 (€7.15) and obtain the information to log in with a Premium account which would allow them to pay far less than regular customers.

Once the purchase is concluded, the sellers commit themselves to send the registration information to the users’ email address, Daily Mail reports.

Furthermore, they guarantee that the accounts will never expire, as long as you keep the same username and password, of course.

And just in case the buyer does comply with the rules and keeps the same logging-in details, but the account does expire in less than a year, the third-party seller promises to provide new registration information free of charge.

Netflix's guidelines are not clear enough

Since users can buy these accounts for almost half the price on eBay, Netflix is bound to lose a significant amount of money.

However, although the streaming media provider’s guidelines strictly forbid the use of one’s login information for commercial purposes, the sharing of this information is not very rigorously banned.

The company's terms of use do not explicitly forbid users from sharing their account details, but merely advise them not to, "The Account Owner's control is exercised through use of the Account Owner's password and therefore to maintain exclusive control, the Account Owner should not reveal the password to anyone."

But how people manage to get their hands on the log-in details they put up for sale is not entirely clear, and there are multiple theories.

One of the most plausible is that hackers trick genuine customers into providing their usernames and passwords using different programs.

There are also the programs that generate codes which enable sellers to create several accounts. Even if the company manages to single out the fake accounts, sellers will offer their customers new codes using the same generator so that they watch their favorite shows for less money.