Netflix Confirmation Email Fail

tl;dr - You can register for Netflix using ANY email address, without requiring you to verify ownership.

I have a couple of roommates, let us call them A and B. A is parsimonious and he keeps signing up for Netflix using new email addresses every month, taking advantage of the one month free trial offered. Apparently he ran out of email addresses last month, and signed up for a new trial using B’s email address.

B, on the other hand, remembers receiving emails from Netflix, but deleted them thinking they were spam that happened to get through GMail’s filters. When he found out about the whole situation, he felt violated, and I can totally understand why. This may only be a miniature form of identity theft, but it still feels like a personal boundary has been crossed.

B was, in fact, looking to take advantage of Netflix’s free trial with the Spring Break coming up. He can’t anymore, to say the least.

This is a major fail on the part of Netflix and it is unacceptable that they don’t provide a way to verify email ownership (which I don’t imagine is too hard).