Netflix has been trying to crack down on people who don’t live in the same household or use the same IP address using the same account.

It’s not really working, but they are trying.

OP had the opposite problem for the past decade, which started out with him getting an email thanking him for signing up for Netflix. When he called to say that he didn’t they failed to believe him, and there seemed to be no real way to remove himself from the account.

Between eight and ten years ago I received an email welcoming me to Netflix. That was a bit concerning since I hadn’t signed up so I contacted the company. They told me someone must have accidentally used my email when they created an account. Our last names were the same and our first initial.

I said Oh no problem, you must have additional contact information for them besides my email, could you please remove my email from the account and let them know so they can fix?

Well, immediately that was a big problem for Netflix and well, no they couldn’t remove the email because it was the only one they had for the account and how did they even know that it was mine? I said give me your email address and start talking, I will email you the words as they come out of your mouth.

That wasn’t good enough for proof somehow. More likely I was in the other person’s Gmail account asking to not have Netflix?

He even tried clueing the other people in by changing the password, thinking they’d have to call to reset it, but they didn’t.

What they finally ended up doing was changing the account password so that when the customer went to log back in they wouldn’t be able to and would need to do a password reset by calling Netflix and then they would confirm the email address. I kept getting Netflix emails so that didn’t work – I called again, same again – didn’t work.

I changed the password several times myself because I could use the forgot password function and get an email to reset it, that didn’t work. I don’t know how they kept getting the new password without updating an email address and I didn’t really care at this point.

And for a decade, he used a ‘Family’ profile on the account. His eventual kids used it. There were other profiles but none of them every used the ‘Family’ one that he could tell.

For the last eight to ten years I have had Netflix on everything thing I own. I have signed in on hotel televisions, used it on my phone, my XBOXs; My kid uses it. I only ever signed in under “Family” and told him to do the same.

The entire history in “Family” is us. The other logins, “Fred”, “Softee”, and “Lylla” accumulated history. I would occasionally look because, curious.

Never did a single new show appear in the “Family” watch history that wasn’t because of me.

Then one day he was informed his email was no longer associated with the account.

Well, I woke up this morning to an email from Netflix telling me that this email address was no longer associated with that account and if I had any questions etc.

Thank you Softee! It has been an amazing run and I am not sure why you gave me free Netflix for the last decade but I think you are amazing!

He figures it was a good run, though!

I bet Reddit is going to love this one!

This person says it’s kind of like having an imaginary friend.

It’s like being a stalker, but without any ill intent.

In this case, I might be tempted to just accept the invitation.

Oh, I would HAVE to meet this guy. The stories!

This person says it must have been good clean living.

I mean, you never look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

Or something like that, anyway.