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Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
- alrs 13y agoAs there is nothing remotely illegal or even nefarious about using a VPN, one can assume we've gone over the falls. The United States and its financial system exist to serve the interests of some truly disgusting people.
- dhimes 13y agoI so fucking hope you are overreacting, but I fear that you are not.
- gregschlom 13y agoNo need for the aggressive tone. And you're overreacting just as much to his/her reply.
- teawrecks 13y agoI don't think either of then sounded like they were overacting, damnit!
- dangrossman 13y ago> As there is nothing remotely illegal or even nefarious about using a VPN There's a reason every risk scoring tool for e-commerce highly weighs whether the connection is from a VPN or other type of proxy. Using a VPN is not illegal or nefarious, but public anonymizing VPNs (as opposed to private VPN-into-the-company-network VPNs) are used for illegal and nefarious purposes to a huge degree. The volume of fraud occurring through them is measured in billions of dollars a year.
- chadaustin 13y ago(Responding because I saw you were instantly downvoted, even though you provided factual information.) Absolutely correct. Fraud scoring systems are heuristic. Your fraud score is positively and negatively correlated with a large number of behaviors, almost all of which are benign by themselves, but in aggregate can be used to predict fraudulent behavior.
- happywolf 13y agoAny references on "The volume of fraud occurring through them is measured in billions of dollars a year."?
- jnbiche 13y agoAnd this sudden change in the state of affairs would explain why Payson "was complying with an urgent requirement from Visa and Mastercard to stop accepting payments for VPN services" with a two day window? Or are you addressing some other issue?
- sixothree 13y agoIt sounds to me like you're confusing two very different things - paying for a VPN for the sake of privacy confused with using a vpn to make purchases.
- _mulder_ 13y agoYes, but might the people using VPNs to make fraudulent purchases not use fraudulent details to buy the VPN in the first place?
- aspensmonster 13y agoAnd this is why technical solutions on their own are not enough. They'll just keep restricting and banning technologies they feel are too dangerous to their interests, whether by the legislature or the courts or by hitting up the payment processors themselves. Whether it's ITAR or SOPA or PIPA or ACTA or TPP, the net effect is the same. Political action must be taken. All of the forward secrecy and TLS and onion routing and steganography and PGP and AES in the world counts for nothing if they'll just declare such technologies illegal and harass the users.
- cortesoft 13y agoThis is why the key is to make these types of services ubiquitous..... if everyone is using them for everything, then it becomes more difficult to infer anything from their use.
- ChrisAntaki 13y agoAgreed AspensMonster, we need to support politicians who support our liberties.
- chatmasta 13y agoDoes anyone have a list of VPNs banned thusfar? I run a proxy provider right now, and am branching into VPNs in the coming months. But I will be actively filtering against torrent traffic since it seems to be such an attractor of negative attention. I wonder if these bans apply mostly to torrent-marketed providers? Also, is it possible they were banned for other reasons? Eg high chargeback ratios? I can tell you from experience that chargeback ratios in the anonymization industry are very high, for obvious reasons.
- HoochTHX 13y agoI spoke to a friend that owns and operates a VPN service and he says it is only iPredator at the moment, and that is conveniently left out of the torrentfreak article. To me it looks like MasterCard is just targeting the pirate bay peeps.
- dangrossman 13y agoKeep in mind that this is about chargeback risk, not implementing some secret government policy. "Anonymizing VPNs" are a high risk service -- the people signing up for them are more often "bad guys" than tech professionals looking for privacy -- and they're signing up with stolen payment information. There are far more hackers, crackers, carders, "script kiddies", spammers and other people that need to hide their location or appear to be connecting from a different country than there are IT professionals interested in paying for extra privacy. Adult sites, online pharmacies, ticket brokers are treated the same way, and that has nothing to do with evading the NSA. MasterCard added all internet services (the MCC -- merchant category code -- that covers ISPs) to a high risk tier earlier in the year; I got the letter from First Data in the mail myself.
- weavejester 13y ago> the people signing up for them are more often "bad guys" than tech professionals looking for privacy -- and they're signing up with stolen payment information That's a bold claim. Do you have any evidence of that?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nothxbro 13y agoIts really not bold at all. If you drink that koolaid, Sounds like you would also believe megaupload was used 'primarily for non infringing use'
- weavejester 13y agoI suspect that most people who commit copyright infringement are not credit card thieves. However, I don't like drawing conclusions without evidence, and I don't think it should be considered naive to ask for evidence before making up one's mind. In fact, I'd consider it extremely foolish to do otherwise.
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- dil8 13y agoThis is exactly the problem with monopolised payment systems. There is absolutely no due process in these decision. These large corporations can change their so called 'policies' to financially cripple entities that they do not agree with. And it seems the burden of proof falls to the party that has been banned, which is absolutely ridiculous.
- anologwintermut 13y agoOr they got burned on charge back rates the same way porn sites did in the 90's. In which case, any payment system that offers charge backs likely would make the same call. Now digital currencies(which don't have charge backs typically), would solve that problem, but the lack of a main stream one of those is not clearly the result of a monopoly. It makes little sense that the US gov had these guys banned because they were anonymous since they aren't. Mounting trafic coloration attacks against a VPN is trivial if you see everything going in and out ( same for Tor). Maybe the RIAA and MPAA had enough clout to do it, but why not usenet providers as well?
- hosh 13y agoLooks like there is a non-trivial opportunity for a VPN service that accepts bitcoins.
- DamnYuppie 13y agoSeveral all ready do. The issue is that getting bit coins for the average web users is a non trivial exercise.
- walid 13y agoBitcoin is going to be more popular but we still have to fight for it.
- cpursley 13y agoWell no shit, the credit card companies are controlled by the banking cartels. These are the same companies in charge of the US Federal Reserve and various global private central banks. VPN's and crypto-currency are a huge threat to these institutions.
- quackerhacker 13y agoI hope this pushes for stronger Bitcoin adoption!
- lucb1e 13y agoWell it was only a matter of time. They don't give a damn about the actual law (also looking at the Wikileaks case), they are just better off when nobody is anonymous. More Tor exit relays, anyone?
- snitko 13y agoBitcoin users not affected. As always.
- uniclaude 13y agoAs someone who used to live in a place where using a pay VPN service was the simplest solution to access sites like wikipedia or even gmail (this one was not blocked all the time though), this news does not feel really good. This said, most of my friends there have moved on to using some VPSs for that long ago, and so do I, when I go there to see them. Bitcoin sounds helpful for the ones not willing to use those methods, but for how long?
- lvturner 13y agoI'm in the same boat - thankfully I'm signed up for a year... but not being able to renew easily sounds like it could become a PITA. I've tried using AWS + OpenVPN in the past, but really life is too short to maintain your own VPN service (especially dealing with mutating firewalls)
- necro 13y agoI know many services block or negatively rate connections coming from hosting providers. Personally we see that most of the spam attempts are via cheap VPSs. I'm not sure if they actually hack these or simply just purchase a $9/month host, install VPN, and go to work on spam. Our system keeps track of all netblocks and the companies they belong to and we classify those so our site can take action accordingly. Normally we just alert mods if a new user is created or a new first post is placed by a user originating from one of these hosting companies so it can be checked. Banning access totally from these would leviate some work. My personal experience has been that access to my site via VPN services or ips belonging to hosting providers, are mostly spammers. I think that eventually everything will go anonymous and that will make it much harder to detect and filter spam/fraud. It's going to take smarter tools and changes on sites to detect spam/fraud by usage patterns instead of source. The sad part is that these changes will effect all legit users negatively in order to try to prevent the few bad apples.
- danboarder 13y agoIf a larger percentage of (normal) people used VPNs then this would change; VPNs would be scored as a closer to normal factor in calculating fraud risk.
- adamconroy 13y agoI think this is a bit weird. I can understand the credit card providers not accepting payments coming from a known vpn, but stopping people from signing up for a vpn is a bit nefarious.
- adamconroy 13y agoSomewhat OT. What is good way to use a vpn (not the sort of vpn connecting two networks which I have done before). Can I configure my router (or buy a router that supports this) so that all traffic leaving my house appears as though it is coming from the vpn? I realise I can just search for VPN providers, but I am interested in what is considered the best/easiest/cheapest solution.
- bifrost 13y agoWe covered this a couple weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5914402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5914402), its generally a lost cause to do all your VPNing on your home router due to low CPU power on those devices. Having a VPN configured and available on all of your devices makes it easy to use on a whim, probably the best thing for your privacy.
- ferdo 13y agoBitcoin + https://www.privateinternetaccess.com https://www.privateinternetaccess.com. What's a credit card?
- downandout 13y agoUsing a random Wifi hotspot when traveling is an act of insanity without a VPN. There are some bad guys that use VPNs, but so do many affluent, tech-savvy business travelers. This group, which is highly coveted by Visa/MC, will now be introduced to and eventually become comfortable with Bitcoin. It's like Visa had an all-hands meeting to come up with the best way to drive their target customers to alternative payment methods.
- inopinatus 13y agoWell, I agree with your first point, but I think you're overstating both the carrot and the stick of the alternative. The corporate users have company VPNs; the solo road warriors / lean startups can (already do) rent a cheap VPS for tunnel egress. And whatever your personal view, Bitcoin still sounds like snake oil to most people.
- belorn 13y agoVPN's are unique in providing translation from a dynamic IPv4, to multiple static IPv4. Since most ISP's won't give out enough static IPv4 addresses, if you want to run private servers at home then a VPN is more or less the only way. Dynamic DNS can be used for a singular server, through how reliable depend on the TTL and how accepting other DNS resolvers are in accepting low TTL's (which in practice some aren't). However, if you are behind NAT, VPN is truly the only option for home servers.
- lnanek2 13y agoMany ISPs forbid running servers on residential connections. So it could even be intentional.
- kimlelly 13y agoYou may give https://mullvad.net https://mullvad.net a try: - You can pay cash - They're based in Europe
- smegel 13y agoI guess that means they work, which is one good thing to come out of this (assuming some are still left).
- o0-0o 13y agoArticle has been corrected. The problem with with the acquiring bank.
- Wistar 13y agoIs it just me or is everyone getting the impossible to dismiss popup covering the story?
- gcb0 13y agoYou morons. Visa and mastercard are doing you a favor. Who would pay an anonymizing service with credit card?!
- da_n 13y agoVPNs aren't just used for anonymizing, connecting to public/untrusted WiFi for example.
- a3n 13y agoThis is a danger in privatized money, which credit cards are essentially becoming.