Comment by capableweb
3 years ago
According to TFA, it's because of multiple reasons, not just one search warrant:
> This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.
3 years ago
According to TFA, it's because of multiple reasons, not just one search warrant:
> This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.
All of those happen on VPNs period, not just with port forwarding.
Dealing with annoyed law enforcement, hosting providers, and IP reputation is 99% of the value of a VPN. The other 1% is just setting up a VPN server to open proxy everything (which there are scripts on github that can do it in 2mins). Of course its not really preserving privacy much unless there are multiple users...
Any significantly shared connection will have at least one person abusing it and causing most of the problems, the logical conclusion would be to ban the few abusers but if mullvad truely doesn't log/retain billing data as they claim, permanent banning would be difficult as a new account could just be created.
I don't see why they couldn't do some kind of compromise like an account has to be of certain age/spend to use port forwarding. They do keep mappings of ports to account, so its not like they don't know which accounts are abusing. Getting banned would then be more expensive for the abusers.
> I don't see why they couldn't do some kind of compromise like an account has to be of certain age/spend to use port forwarding.
In my personal experience investigating these scammers: people are happy to resell "used accounts of good age and reputation that they no longer need" on blackhat marketplaces — usually for about a dollar.
Here's one such marketplace: https://lzt.market/
(Hopefully linking to it like this will increase the probability of the right eyes seeing it and getting it taken down)