The original post: /r/vpn by /u/leftyrancher on 2025-02-20 19:21:53.

A reminder before you read: you were not tagged in this, you were not asked for an opinion; if this post gets you heated, just close the window, walk away, pet your favorite animal, and take a deep breath – you don’t need to respond.

A paying customer was having an issue with their IP address being leaked when it shouldn’t have been. The cause of the potential leak is irrelevant to this current post. They didn’t get a satisfactory resolution through customer service, so they took to a “public” forum to ex press (verb, not company) their concern. They had a valid issue, plenty of legitimate evidence and reasoning, and they deserved an answer for why they weren’t receiving what they contracted the service provider to provide.

I chimed in because the post was being artificially downvoted and it deserved an official response. So I commented, “This post should have more upvotes – ****** needs to respond.” in order to hopefully help boost the post and get an official answer – if their issue is legitimate, it affects my privacy also, so I would like a response myself.

Instead of a formal response denying or explaining the issue and how to fix it, the VPN provider simply decided to delete the post. That makes it look quite strange. Someone claims their VPN provider is leaking their data, the post gets a lot of views and responses, then the provider pulls the post from their reddit – seems kinda like they’re just trying to hush-up something they’re aware of and don’t want to risk culpability for.

So, I take a screenshot of that post being deleted and post it in the subreddit with the title “Guess ***** responded… and that response was “we don’t care”.” Got 5.1k views within 50 minutes. Over 10k by 2 hours. The post was building momentum and getting seen a lot.

A bunch of fanbois/girlz decided to take time out of their busy days to chime in and attack me personally for wanting accountability from the VPN provider. They couldn’t even look at the picture long enough to see that I was posting a screenshot of another users post, so they were responding to the screenshot as if I posted the original post. So most of the personal attacks weren’t even relevant or germane because they were responding to the person who’s post I took a picture of.

After the post got over 15k views, the VPN provider realized that it really looked like they didn’t care, so they decided that they would respond by once again deleting a post, and deleted my post.

So now they’ve doubled down on making it look like they have a leaking problem they’re aware of and simply haven’t fixed yet. They fabricated the rationale for deleting the post, too – saying that all the people insulting me was me “insulting community members” when my responses were usually just a reformatted version of the comment made towards me.

All in all, it was just the cherry-on-top of a pile of evidence that’s been mounting for the past couple months that this VPN provider is no longer what they used to be, and may even be compromised. Their response was the final straw in the decision to look for up-and-coming companies that actually put privacy before profit, and don’t shy away from resolving customer’s issues with privacy.

Alright – bring on the down-votes.