Hacker News Reader

I won't speak for the parent, but, some people have been know to use Virtual Machine that pretend to be a "Friend" and take advantage of Dropbox's customer acquisition technique.

View on HN

In mid 2013 I signed up 22 referred accounts in a VM box for a family member with a newly created Dropbox account. Three months later all 22 inactive accounts were removed, and the extra storage was gone too.

I did it in 2011 as well for my own account and still have the extra storage. I've since upgraded though. Even 15GB is peanuts today...

This works. They use your MAC address of your network adapter to differentiate referrals.

No they don't; I've referred multiple times from the same machine using different users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com