Well, don't buy from a VPN provider that is suspiciously cheap. If a no-name company starts selling suspiciously cheap smartphones, the odds of those smartphon

Well, don't buy from a VPN provider that is suspiciously cheap. If a no-name company starts selling suspiciously cheap smartphones, the odds of those smartphones being backdoored/stolen/broken goes up pretty dramatically. That doesn't mean that every company selling smartphones is equally untrustworthy. Of course it's a problem how hard it is to tell if a VPN company is trustworthy, but that's a problem that exists for almost every 3rd-party relationship I enter into.