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PureVPN facing legal issues?

22 points by kermitten ↗ HN
Recent mail from PureVPN. I hope it goes well for them, but watch out...

Dear customer,

I'm sorry to inform you that due to an incident we had to close your account permanently. We are no longer able to run an anonymization service due to legal issues we are facing.

We had to handover all customer’s information to the authorities unfortunately. They might contact you if they need any details about the case they are working on. The following information was handed over: your name, billing address and phone number provided during purchase and any documents we had on file (for example scan of your ID or driver’s license if you have provided these to our billing department).

We are also sorry we are not able to refund you, however if you wish your money back, please open a dispute on PayPal or file a chargeback with your credit card company. This is the only way we can refund you as our bank account is frozen during this investigation. We recommend you to do this as soon as possible as we can't guarantee all customers will get their money back.

We apologize once more this had to happen.

Yours sincerely, Uzair Gadit PureVPN founder

9 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 56.1 ms ] thread
thekos
They are claiming, over their twitter account, that the email was faked:

https://twitter.com/purevpn/status/386700121053736963

workhere-io
Guys, email tht u received is a fake. v r NOT closing down nor hav ANY legal issue of ANY sort.

Wow. I seriously would not pay any money to a company that communicates like that.

tmikaeld
Oh man, come on!

I know Twitters can be hard to read but that is just unprofessional.

It looks like a kid wrote it.

mattip
From a naive reading of their privacy policy [0] it seems they also keep a history of sites visited, and make this available to third parties. That doesn't sound like "anonymizing your locality" except to your local ISP, and only if your local ISP or government never asks PureVPN for the info.

[0]http://www.purevpn.com/privacy-policy.php

tmikaeld
I have said this time and time again, the only way to be properly safe when using a VPN is if the supplier can guarantee that NO logs at all are saved - of course, no one can guarantee that without showing you the system.

Setting up your own private fully encrypted (Harddrive) OpenVPN is quite easy and the only "secure" alternative.

hack37
>> Setting up your own private fully encrypted (Harddrive) OpenVPN is quite easy and the only "secure" alternative.

You are misunderstanding the reason people use these services. They use it to stay anonymous because many people use it and it is harder to distinguish what traffic belongs to what user.

If you setup your own vpn server, encrypted or not, it defeats that purpose because one could just listen on the other end.

itspurevpn
Hi Guys!

Thank you for your support here on ycombinator!

Yes it was a fake email sent to PureVPN Customers. However, our VPN service is functioning 100% fine and there is no interruption whatsoever.

While we are further investigating the actual cause. Please check out our blog for further clarifications and updates:

http://www.purevpn.com/blog/fake-email-to-clients-update-1/

We are also keeping our customers updated every minute through our Twitter channel. Please follow us on twitter @purevpn for further updates.

Thank you everyone!

PureVPN Team!

kermitten
Good to hear you are not closing down! :)