Ladies and gentlemen, do we now have a potential VPN criminal conglomerate?
As many of you have already read, Private Internet Access has recently been acquired by a company named “Kape Technologies” (https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/11/bellum-omnium-contra-omnes-the-war-of-all-against-all/) . “Kape Technologies” is a huge company that also owns the likes of CyberGhost VPN as well as Zenmate. I decided to read more and found facts that thoroughly shocked me:
- CyberGhost was acquired by “Kape Technologies” (previously named “Crossrider”) back in 2017. “Crosrider” was known to hide malware/adware in their software and then sell data collected by it.(https://blog.malwarebytes.com/detections/pup-optional-crossrider/).
- The co-founder of “Kape Technologies”, Teddy Sagi was sentenced to prison in regards to fraud and bribery back in 1996 (https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-sagis-criminal-past-may-have-sunk-plus500-acquisition-1001083269).
- CyberGhost VPN service was also found to have WebRTC, IPv6 as well as DNS leaks multiple times, risking its users’ privacy.
- Private Internet Access hired Mark Karpeles (ex-CEO of MT.Gox BitCoin platform) as their CTO. Karpeles was arrested and found guilty when tampering with financial records, trying to hide the platform’s loss by combining his personal finances with the exchange’s (https://cointelegraph.com/news/former-mt-gox-ceo-mark-karpeles-to-serve-as-cto-of-new-japanese-blockchain-venture).
- Private Internet Access’s founder, Andrew Lee, also known as “Rasengan” on HackerNews, made serious allegations against ProtonVPN (https://www.reddit.com/r/sevengali/comments/9dgexs/why_to_avoid_pia/).
- Allegations against NordVPN followed, where PIA’s employee was caught sharing a misleading PDF as a ‘concerned citizen’ (https://vpnpro.com/blog/confusion-in-the-vpn-industry-is-nordvpn-being-defamed/).
- An ex-employee of Private Internet Access was threatened due to disclosing management issues, therefore spilling a lot of information about the company (https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1088904-private-internet-access-internal-problems-post-is-titled-revealing-the-privateinternetaccess-truth/, https://snew.notabug.io/r/PrivateInternetAccess/comments/ckbuei/revealing_the_privateinternetaccess_truth/).
- The same employee disclosed that PIA faked Reddit comments and ordered to downvote negative feedback about the product.
- Another thing to consider is that before acquisition, Private Internet Access was in debt of over $32 million ‘(https://www.techradar.com/news/cyberghost-owner-buys-pia-for-dollar955m-to-create-vpn-giant).
The facts about these companies were easy to find, to be honest, I didn’t need to dig deep to find them. I am just truthfully shocked about this and how much I didn’t know about the companies beforehand. Personally, given this knowledge, I am not going to support these companies, especially when they potentially have criminal past and present activities.
