How do you pay for VPN service?

[Rifter]

Bitcoin, obviously, it would totally defeat the purpose to pay it in any way that could be traced back to you. Honestly i dont even understand why a VPN company would accept CC or paypal.

 

[lxskllr]

Honestly i dont even understand why a VPN company would accept CC or paypal.

VPNs aren't just for privacy freaks. Travelers using iffy wifi, or someone wanting a different ip address would benefit, and not necessarily want maximum privacy.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

BTC, bought with ETH that I mined.

Incidentally, I overpaid considering where BTC went after I bought it.

 

[dainthomas]

I just paid with one of my credit cards (got a deal on Nord VPN from slick deals I think). I'm not obsessed with the government locating me; Jesus they can find me through the ten billion other things I've bought with CC. I just wanted a VPN client to be more safe when using public wifi mainly.

For me it's IPVanish. I got it for public wifi and watching in-market games on MLB Network.

 

[mindless1]

Bitcoin, obviously, it would totally defeat the purpose to pay it in any way that could be traced back to you. Honestly i dont even understand why a VPN company would accept CC or paypal.

Would defeat what purpose? On most good VPNs they cannot associate your identity with what you're doing on the VPN. They're deliberately set up that way.

Associating your identity only proves you paid for that VPN service, not even that you've ever used it, which is not a crime and doesn't give anyone anything to use against you.

Are you afraid google is going to hack the VPN subscription database, trace it back to you, then show you ads for competing VPNs on every other website using google ads, instead of ads for xyz?

I'm seriously trying to imagine a scenario, one that is backed by a historical example, rather than just paranoia, where payment via a method tied to one's identity will cause a problem?

 

[GrumpyMan]

Well pretty soon Firefox will come with a VPN so you can go that route too for a monthly fee.

 

[rh71]

https://torrentfreak.com/dallas-buyers-club-loses-piracy-lawsuit-ip-address-is-not-enough-171110/

“The ruling says that there is no way to know whether the defendant was the P2P user or not, because an IP address only identifies the person who subscribed to the Internet connection, not the user who made use of the connection at a certain moment,” copyright lawyer David Bravo tells TorrentFreak.

“A relative or a guest could have been using the network, or even someone accessing the wifi if it was open,” he adds.

If you compare the above scenario with people receiving red light camera tickets in the mail regardless of who was driving the vehicle, it's pretty similar since they only issue them by license plate. Those are legal in states like CA. I know that's only here in the US, but why would one take precedence if it's the same concept?

As far as payment method and getting caught, better VPNs cannot tie your account to what you download. Payment info is only tied to login and expiry date. Their servers do not log activity. The most a warrant would get for past activity is that you are a client, among many, if your payment method is traceable.

I've paid for my VPN via CC and certainly hope what you said is true.

 

[Lemmilloo]

What method do you guys use to pay for your VPN service?

Since I use VPN mostly for gaming, I've found a collection of variants for such purposes like that https://www.wizcase.com/blog/best-vpn-for-pubg-mobile/ and now use SurfShark as it's the cheapest variant and the best for my goal.

 

[umbrella39]

CC... The odds of them tracking you down from a copyright complaint through your VPN provider then ascertaining the account holders name and address via the CC trail would be highly unlikely...

Using a CC attached to a PP account instead of manually inputting on the VPN account pages makes it even less likely...

 

[Bulldog21]

Bitcoins, of course. But as I know not all providers allow this paying method. Surfshark does. I don't know about others.

 

[Midwayman]

I'm less concerned about the government than I am about the stupid notices I get when torrenting totally legal linux distros.

 

[Muse]

OK, I'm a newbie in this stuff. I just watched a couple of videos on youtube where a guy indulged Indian (evidently) scammers pretending to work for Microsoft, and another guy who pretended to work for the IRS. ScammerRevolt is the youtuber's handle on the first video. He had a virtual machine going and the scammer got him to install Teamviewer, which evidently is a two way street. Thus, the hunted was able to fuck with the scammer's machine and he merrily deleted shit off his machine unbeknownst to him. Meantime, the scammer was totally unaware that the hunted was on a virtual machine and evidently immune from attack. ScammerRevolt explained that since Teamviewer was the intermediary, deleted files didn't go to Recycle Bin but are permanently deleted.

The 2nd video with the IRS phony was strictly telephone, the hunted pretending to be concerned about the call he'd gotten asserting that he was under IRS investigation.

Got the idea to check this stuff out from Mayne's recent thread talking about Youtube videos on scammer backlash.

So, how does a VPN differ from this? TIA...

 

[Charmonium]

As far as payment method and getting caught, better VPNs cannot tie your account to what you download. Payment info is only tied to login and expiry date. Their servers do not log activity. The most a warrant would get for past activity is that you are a client, among many, if your payment method is traceable.

I can never tell when I'm talking down to people but I kind of assumed everybody knew this - not all vpns are "non-logging." And for the ones that are, you're mostly taking their word for it. How would you prove that anyway?

Fortunately, non-logging VPNs that have been around for a few years and there are no screaming phillipics about how bad they are, should be safe.

Several years ago I had a VPN rat me out to my ISP because I made this mistake. DMCA notices make me physically itch so I fixed that right away.