HN Explorer

Connecting HoneyGain to NordVPN and Parent Company OxyLabs

10 points by Whistlethis ↗ HN
On May 19th, 2021 it was made public through a PR campaign that HoneyGain signed an exclusivity agreement with OXYLABS for long term traffic demand. Reference : https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/honeygain-signs-an-exclusivity-deal-to-ensure-long-term-traffic-demand-301251137.html .

OxyLabs is a company within the TESONET portfolio which can be seen here : https://tesonet.com/companies/ .

Sandra Krikstaponyte was the previous product owner at OXYLABS. Ironically she became the Product Director at Honeygain in June of 2022 based on her linkedin. Looking at DNB it is clear that she was always the 1 and only company director.

All employees of HoneyGain that do in fact have Linkedin, all have one common denominator. They are all ex-leadership members from OxyLabs.

Some examples are below :

Name: Adomas Odinas Eigirdas LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adomas-odinas-eigirdas-138152163/ Position: Quality Assurance Specialist @ HoneyGain - May 2023 - Present Previous: Quality Assurance Specialist @ Oxylabs.io - Dec 2022 - May 2023

Name: Lukas Stankovičius LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukas-stankovicius/ Position: Senior Site Reliability Engineer @ HoneyGain - Jun 2023 - Present Previous: Senior Site Reliability Engineer @ Oxylabs.io - Apr 2023 - Jun 2023

Name: Žygimantas S. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sakalinskas/ Position: Site Reliability Engineer @ HoneyGain - May 2023 - Present Previous: Site Reliability Engineer @ Oxylabs.io - Jul 2022 - Jun 2023

Name: Rytis M. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rytis-malakauskas/ Position: Lead Site Reliability Engineer @ HoneyGain - Apr 2023 - Present Previous: Lead Site Reliability Engineer @ Oxylabs.io - Dec 2022 - Apr 2023

Name: Greta Anuskytė LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greta-anuskyt%C4%97-482a12171/ Position: Accounting Operations Specialist @ HoneyGain - Oct 2022 - Present Previous: Accounting Operations Specialist @ Oxylabs.io - Apr 2022 - Oct 2022

Name: Lukas Rakauskas LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukas-rakauskas/ Position: Frontend Engineer @ HoneyGain - May 2023 - Present Previous: Frontend Engineer @ Oxylabs.io - Aug 2022 - May 2023

Name: Skomantas Sukackas LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skomantas-sukackas-268b3b15b/ Position: Junior Data Analyst @ HoneyGain - Apr 2023 - Present Previous: Junior Data Analyst @ Oxylabs.io - Jun 2022 - Apr 2023

Name: Mantas Džiaugys LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mantas-dziaugys/ Position: Android Developer @ HoneyGain - May 2023 - Present Previous: Android Developer @ Oxylabs.io - Feb 2019 - May 2023

Name: Domantas Onaitis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/domantas-onaitis-616764153/ Position: Sales Team Lead @ HoneyGain - May 2023 - Present Previous: Account Manager @ Oxylabs.io - Mar 2022 - May 2023

Name: Darius Misiukevičius LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/misiukevicius-darius/ Position: Risk And Operations Manager @ HoneyGain - Mar 2023 - Present Previous: PM @ Oxylabs.io - Jun 2018 - Mar 2023

Name: Justas Gervinskas LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justasgervinskas/ Position: Lead Project Manager @ HoneyGain - Mar 2023 - Present Previous: Project Manager @ Oxylabs.io - Sep 2019 - Mar 2023

Name: Marius D. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marius-dubinovas/ Position: Customer Success Team Lead @ HoneyGain - Apr 2023 - Present Previous: Customer Success Team Lead @ Oxylabs.io - Apr 2022 - Apr 2023

Name: Sandra Krikštaponytė LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-krik%C5%A1taponyt%C4%97-a79ba4107/ Position: Product Director @ HoneyGain - Jun 2022 - Present Previous: Product Owner at Oxylabs.io @ Oxylabs.io - May 2022 - Jun 2022

Based on this it is very...

15 comments

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Whistlethis
Conclusion : I would like to hear what others have to say however my opinion is that this evidence shows a direct relationship between OxyLabs and Honeygain and it is very likely that OxyLabs is the owner of HoneyGain behind the scenes.
xchip
Thanks for this, NordVPN and all these VPNs have been fishy from the beginning, so thanks again for providing proofs.
Whistlethis
Not all VPN companies are fishy. Some legitimate VPN companies do exist in the industry. That said, this specific scenario is especially concerning because of the blatant proof. If you look closely every single employee moved from OxyLabs to HoneyGain and they did not even put any effort to conceal it because they took the exact same position at HoneyGain.

Rather than pedalling my own opinion though, I would really like to know your opinion and the opinion of other readers on YCombinator. This is a strictly OPINION based article where I am simply laying out facts that are publicly available online.

It's interesting how the term "publicly available information" does not always work in the favour of data scraping entities.

antman77
This is funny for sure. I am not surprised though. Wasn't OxyLabs caught up in something with ProtonVPN and a web of lies at one point? Is it really even news to hear that they are broiled up in yet another attempt to do something shady in the VPN industry?
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Whistlethis
OxyLabs has asked their employees to as quickly as possible remove evidence of honeygain + oxylabs from their linkedin profiles.Luckily I have screenshots of most of them and there is clear evidence left behind. Come on oxylabs. Respond to this instead of trying to hide the truth.

You operate a botnet + P2P Reverse Proxy platform called Honeygain and you're trying to infiltrate VPN companies by selling services to them as a company name that you don't publicly disclose as being related to OxyLabs/NordVPN!

HPUnEb
Funnily enough, this is completely true, no speculation required. Honeygain is owned by Oxylabs, and so is JumpTask. Honeygain was first established in Belarus. Not physically, there was just some dude whose name was used for legal purposes. The guy did exist for real, but did not have any power in Honeygain. You can check some older PR articles where the location of the articles are Minsk, Belarus. They did not put any effort to remove it. Anyway, we still worked from Oxylabs office in Lithuania. After political turmoil in Belarus, Honeygain had to "make a move" so they "moved" to Lithuania and established UAB Honeygain. This happened rather recently and every employee that got greenlight for transfer had to quietly change their workplace in Linkedin. By quietly I mean not to make an announcement like "started new position at Honeygain". The thing is, they did not realize that past workplaces are clearly visible and you had cought them, OP. To mitigate some possible risks, there were plans to act like Oxylabs "acquired" Honeygain. That was the narrative they had in mind and started a campaign regarding the announcement of Oxylabs partnership with Honeygain. There are still articles floating around about it, and they are trying to scrape it off the face of earth for whatever reason. It's chaotic to say the least. As for JumpTask, it was created as a way to pay Honeygain users less. And it should raise suspicions even without insider information as to why JumpTask, a completely unknown project with no investors and nothing, immediatelly got a partnership with Honeygain, arguably the biggest passive income application in the world. It's just plain weird. Not weird when you know that JumpTask was created by Honeygain, and Honeygain was created by Oxylabs. You should poke around the JumpTask "About us" page and the Linkedin accounts of the key members there. You should find the same thing there, previous employments at Oxylabs and whatnot. There are quite a few names like that in general (formerly at Oxylabs, currently at JumpTask). Only the new batches of hires start immediatelly at Honeygain or JumpTask. Another tip would be to check the archived versions of JumpTask "About us" page. People changed and they may still have some information hiding in plain sight (Linkedin, that is, or internet as a whole where articles matter). Source: former employee of all three products.
Whistlethis
Well this is fun. So tell us then did Honeygain get created so nordvpn could use their IPs for streaming and also sell to competitors as lexistream? Tell us about the lexistream creation if you are in fact an ex employee.

Also would love to hear your take on shortcuts taken by honeygain to acquire IPs as I’ve heard about botnet usage.

HPUnEb
At its core, Honeygain was created to supply Oxylabs with proxies. Residential IP addresses are very valuable in this market but they are not easy to acquire. Giving people money for allowing their IP address to be used for various purposes in the proxy field is a good venture. However, since you have to pay the users, it can hardly be profitable. That's why JumpTask and Lexistream (yup, Lexistream is also a product of Oxylabs/Honeygain team :) ) were created. JumpTask allows them to pay users less whereas Lexistream allows the usage of IPs acquired via Honeygain to be used for streaming purposes (as its called there - Content Delivery or CD) and as an channel of revenue by selling those streaming IPs to VPNs and whatnot. Now, of course, most of these streaming IPs are sold on the inside for products that are under Tesonet's portfolio. NordVPN is the biggest client, needless to say. They also supply Surfshark. These IPs are sold for Tesonet at a lower price since they are all connected. The prices for "outsiders", such as Cyberghost or Windscribe are bigger. You could argue that this is nothing TOO bad about this, but think about the power dynamics here. Think why streaming services such as Netflix work so well with NordVPN as opposed to other VPNs? When you control the pool (via Lexistream, Honeygain, Oxylabs and so on), you have control on which IPs to give to whom. Favoring NordVPN, they give actually good quality IPs to them and a mixed bag for "outsiders". They can also simply turn off the streaming feature for certain IPs to keep Nord and other buddies in check, as in, keeping them the most reliable VPN when it comes to streaming. This gives a competitve edge as you may understand. Finally, in regards to botnet usage in IP acquisition, I can surely say that this is not true. No shortcuts taken in the acquisition of IPs.
Whistlethis
Add me on telegram @mediamonkey77

Chat soon!

xtc777
What are the main competitors of Lexistream? Do they even have any serious competitors for this streaming business?
yegor
Interesting/juicy details here.