The thought of subscribing to YouTube Premium usually comes up mean the vast majority of users of the service in its standard version, i.e. the free one. Google is constantly looking for ways to make the service more attractive and thus attract more subscribers. But let’s not kid ourselves, the main reason to do so is to say goodbye to video ads, at least initially.

This has increased substantially in recent times, and the reason is, of course, nothing more than the efforts that the platform is making Prevent users from skipping ads with ad blockers. In fact, just in the last few weeks we’ve heard so much about the actions the service has taken to exploit these tools, and even more recently it’s been working to make ad insertion happen directly at the server level, making it much more difficult to avoid using the usual tools .

Pikareska now has no restrictions, so if it is no longer possible to skip ads without paying for YouTube Premium, then it’s time to take the next step, which for many users was use a VPN service to contract from another country that has a much lower rate. This is nothing new, we have seen it for many years in other services and also in digital stores, with a special abundance on Steam, where for years the Argentinian store has been the ideal place to buy much, much cheaper.

However, Google seems to have caught the trick and is already acting on it. So as we see on Reddit, Google has begun canceling YouTube Premium subscriptions contracted through VPNs. Of course, the tech company has the courtesy to allow you to continue using the service until your current subscription expires, but it will no longer automatically renew as it has been doing so far.

Among the countries these people use to sign up for YouTube Premium we find, for example, Türkiye and Ukraine (Turkey is another one of those “digital destinations” where cheaper digital subscriptions can be purchased and taken out), making it quite likely that Google tracked subscriptions contracted in these countries and cross-referenced them with usage data, payment methods and other information. which may be useful in detecting the use of this technique.