Our story begins yesterday, when our wonderful elderly neighbor asked me if I could get her on Netflix so she could watch her granddaughter on some show called, "The Circle." Sure... happy to help.. I do remote support for my Dad's windows and android machines, manage a bunch of accounts for him, maintain our own fairly complex and locked down network w/ fifteen or so devices attached... how hard can it be, right?
Background... I had a Netflix account a LONG time ago.. in the DVD era when streaming was still young. Have not had one since... probably 12 years ago, anyway. No other background needed.
The problem.. when trying to sign her up for a new account, using the "30-day free trial" option, NO forms of payment are accepted. The following message pops up every time...
"There appears to be a problem with the payment method you are trying to use."
I have tried five different email accounts, five different credit cards, PayPal, four different devices, three different browsers, logging on from her network, from mine, and from my cell data connection, and the same message appears every time. I know enough to clear the caches, cookies, history, and all other data of each browser, close it, and reopen it before every attempt. Netflix provided me with a gift code for one month, but I can't redeem it without entering a payment method. The "Skip" button a supervisor said should be present as an option is not present.
I was on the phone w/ Netflix support yesterday for a total of five representatives, two supervisors, and three hours. I also text-chatted with another support person for a total of six people contacted. I spent 8 hours on this for my neighbor yesterday, and another two hours so far today.
Netflix's answers can be summed up as "Some credit cards don't work." "We don't know what's causing your issue." "When this problem occurs, we recommend that the customer buy a gift card." Ummm... how can a 30 day free trial be free if you have to buy a gift card?
Devices used include a Win7 laptop with Brave and Firefox browsers, a Win10 laptop w/ Internet Explorer (hers, not mine), a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 using Brave, Chrome, and Firefox browsers, and a Moto G7 using a Brave browser. Email accounts have been two issued by our IP provider, Spectrum, ending in ... @twcny.rr.com, three different protonmail accounts, and two different gmail accounts. Credit cards include Discover, Visa. Also tried PayPal, with links to credit card and checking account.
The Netflix folks assured me that my past account 12 years ago was not a problem, and that they had no record of it. They also assured me that you could sign up for as many accounts as you wished from the same IP, and that wasn't the problem. Now, I have about seven accounts partially setup that I can log into the opening screen, but do nothing else.
I've written to
privacy@netflix.com and asked that they wipe all of those accounts out, but got a form email back saying that they don't do support at that email address... yet that's the address the supervisor gave me.
Spoke w/ the folks at Discover today, and they assured me that my card works for recurring eCommerce transactions as required by Netflix, and that there had been zip, zero, nada transactions from Netflix attempted or denied. Even tried to setup a Netflix account w/ the Discover agent on the line at her suggestion, to see if ANYTHING was getting through. Nope.
If ANY of you, and I know there are a LOT of very skilled IT and network support folks here, have ANY idea what's going on and can help me help my neighbor, and maybe the ignorant souls at Netflix, solve this, I'd be very grateful. I've attached the transcript of the text chat... it was at the end of the day and I was getting a little "punchy," but hopefully it'll help elucidate the issue AND provide some entertainment. I was not at my best... not real proud of some of the things I typed... but we're all human.
