Social media users are calling for the mass cancellation of ExpressVPN subscriptions after it was revealed that a cybersecurity firm with Israeli ties owns the popular privacy service.
In 2021, The Times of Israel reported that Kape Technologies, a British-Israeli digital security company, acquired ExpressVPN, one of the world’s largest virtual private network (VPN) providers, for nearly $1bn.
The calls for cancellation intensified after social media users began circulating information about Teddy Sagi, the Israeli billionaire and owner of Kape Technologies. Many shared that in 2023, as reported by The Jerusalem Post, Sagi donated $1m to transport soldiers during the Israeli war on Gaza.
Even ignoring any ownership issues, it’s an awful service. If you look up “ExpressVPN cancel” you’ll find lots of posts and comments from people complaining that they were charged again after cancelling, that the interface makes it difficult to cancel, that they needed to reach out to support multiple times, etc.
Instead:
- Use a different VPN
- Check if you actually need a VPN for your situation
I check this guide from time to time to see if anything has changed with the usual recommendations:
I don’t know why people don’t use crypto or one time cards for this kind of purchase. You pay for anonymity, you pay for it anonymously.
Crypto takes a lot of effort to trace, but it’s not necessarily anonymous. https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/crypto/are-cryptocurrency-transactions-actually-anonymous/
Just use Mullvad.
Considering that Kape Technologies also owns PIA, this is not great news, consolidation of VPN companies isn’t a good thing here and especially not with Kape. Heck I cancelled asap when PIA was bought because that company is shady AF.
Did you get Mullvad?
There’s a handful of great VPN proiders, and this isn’t one of them. Just do like 10 minutes of research before you buy.
The thing is that 10 min search results in - trust all of them, trust none of them. A lot of folks also have affordability issues. So that makes this issue even more complex. When they turn a bit more “respected” forums they are told to “self host” or are given recommendations that they already knew of but couldn’t afford. So the problem lives on. All this lead to shady and heavy marketing VPNs come to the front.
Wouldn’t self hosting a VPN make you even more identifiable though? Now instead of an generic ISP IP address that changes every few months all your traffic is from a single static IP from a single cloud instance. Not to mention you’re now trading your ISP seeing everything to your VPS provider seeing everything (and not just the internet traffic, everything in your server including the keys used for the VPN transport). And if at any point the packets exiting your VPS ends up back on your own ISP’s network, they now know it’s you who generated them because no one else ever connects to that server. I feel like a public VPN service would have slightly more anonymity simply because you’re not the only source of traffic.
I would assume that they mean ‘VPN not for anonymity’ when they say that. I agree with you though.
Mullvad is cheaper than all the other options by far.
No, I am afraid it’s not. Just because it has a clear one pricing doesn’t make it cheaper. One barely buys a VPN for one or just seven months or so.
Just do like 10 minutes of research before you buy
The average person might not know what’s reputable and what’s not. A lot of the VPN review sites are also secretly run by the VPN companies, or get paid off by them. Someone might even mix up the bad
PrivacyToolsfor the legitimatePrivacyGuidesthe problem w this is that google or chatgpt is going to point you to the most popular ones; which might include this vpn.
I expect this scenario to repeat several times in the coming months/years. Willing to bet the “clean” ones are all infected with mossad spyware as well. Using a VPN makes you a target rather than helping you stay anonymous nowadays.
On a related note, this story from 2024:
I mean, if you’re using Facebook as your VPN provider I don’t know what to tell you.
This is like 2 posts up from this post on my feed:
Samsung Embeds Israeli Surveillance App on Phones Across MENA
Consider me entirely unsurprised. VPN companies do not protect your data, they simply use it for themselves
Unless you are Mullvad.
Obviously intelligence agencies are going to be all up in VPN’s juicy businesses. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all actually run by them and below cost so that nobody who would do it for real and not sell them access could actually be profitable.
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