
Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers - melito
http://torrentfreak.com/mastercard-and-visa-start-banning-vpn-providers-130703/
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dangrossman
Keep 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
> 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?

~~~
nothxbro
Its 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
I 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.

~~~
Ensorceled
Well you did draw the conclusion that it was a "bold claim" without
evidence...

The phrase "bold claim" is usually reserved for cases where the claim seems
unlikely.

~~~
weavejester
Claiming that VPNs have more people signing up with stolen credit cards than
their own credit cards rather unlikely to me. The penalty fees on the
resulting chargeback would make it difficult to make a profit, particularly on
a service that competes on price in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

~~~
Ensorceled
Ah, now I see our problem.

As I see it there are three main customer groups for VPNs; people using it to
circumvent copyright protections (either location based or outright theft),
tech savvy people who want privacy, and bad guys.

The original said more bad guys than tech savvy people, I assumed that
excluded copyright circumventors (the largest group) and you assumed they were
included.

~~~
weavejester
You mean that you assumed "tech savvy people" excluded copyright
circumventors, while I assumed it did?

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alrs
As 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.

~~~
dangrossman
> 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.

~~~
sixothree
It 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_
Yes, but might the people using VPNs to make fraudulent purchases not use
fraudulent details to buy the VPN in the first place?

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aspensmonster
And 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
This 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.

~~~
nateabele
You can't infer anything from VPN use, and it's one of the most ubiquitous
communications-security tools already.

~~~
Karunamon
You can infer a great deal with VPN usage combined with other things, this is
what risk assessment is all about.

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uniclaude
As 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
I'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)

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dil8
This 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
Or 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?

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downandout
Using 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
Well, 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.

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ferdo
Bitcoin +
[https://www.privateinternetaccess.com](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com).

What's a credit card?

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belorn
VPN'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
Many ISPs forbid running servers on residential connections. So it could even
be intentional.

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chatmasta
Does 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
I 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.

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hosh
Looks like there is a non-trivial opportunity for a VPN service that accepts
bitcoins.

~~~
DamnYuppie
Several all ready do. The issue is that getting bit coins for the average web
users is a non trivial exercise.

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quackerhacker
I hope this pushes for stronger Bitcoin adoption!

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walid
Bitcoin is going to be more popular but we still have to fight for it.

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lucb1e
Well 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?

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adamconroy
I 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.

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adamconroy
Somewhat 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
We 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.

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smegel
I guess that means they work, which is one good thing to come out of this
(assuming some are still left).

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cpursley
Well 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.

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o0-0o
Article has been corrected. The problem with with the acquiring bank.

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danboarder
If 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.

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gcb0
You morons. Visa and mastercard are doing you a favor.

Who would pay an anonymizing service with credit card?!

~~~
da_n
VPNs aren't just used for anonymizing, connecting to public/untrusted WiFi for
example.

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Wistar
Is it just me or is everyone getting the impossible to dismiss popup covering
the story?

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a3n
This is a danger in privatized money, which credit cards are essentially
becoming.

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snitko
Bitcoin users not affected. As always.

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kimlelly
You may give [https://mullvad.net](https://mullvad.net) a try:

\- You can pay cash

\- They're based in Europe

