Denied by IPVanish

VPN
1

I’ve been using PIA for a while but I thought I’d try something else - mostly because I had some issues with the PIA app.
After a little bit of research, I picked IPVanish and paid for a month ($8, you get a 20% off if you wait a bit on the purchase page).

I paid with my Visa, the transaction went through and was authorized (basically meaning the money was taken from my account),
but IPVanish informed me that my account has not been activated and that I need to provide some personal
information to ‘verify’ my account.

Thank you for choosing IPVanish VPN.
Our system has detected a potential issue with your payment and we will need some additional
information to activate your account.

Common issues include credit card information mismatch or unknown location or
proxy use during sign up.

To remedy this situation please see below:

If you have signed up with a free email address (such as gmail, Yahoo, etc.) please send
[email protected] an email from a non-free, work or ISP email address.
Make sure to include your username in the email which is EDITED
-OR-
If you do not have a non-free email address, please supply the name of the issuing bank
and the phone number from the back of the credit card.

Also, please tell us the country and location/city that you were in when you signed up.

Optionally, and to speed up activation, you can also simply send us a scan or photo of
a utility bill or magazine that matches the name/address on the     payment type.

If you have any problems please feel free to contact support.

The IPVanish Team

My reply was:

Hi,


I just tried signing up for IPVanish but there seems to be an issue, which is odd since
the payment has apparently been authorized (but not     accepted?). What's up with that?
Have I just made a big mistake trying to switch from PIA?

My username is EDITED.

Regards,

Then they asked me again for my personal information, which got me really annoyed.

Thank you for the reply but I won't provide you with my private information. 
That's not why I'm signing up for a VPN in the first place!

I'm guessing the issue was because your payment form is broken for payers who
are not from the US. I was only able to put in the first two letters     
from the region/state name (EDITED instead of "EDITED", or "EDITED"
including diacritical marks).

Anyway, I'll check my card statement tomorrow morning and will issue
a chargeback if needed.
If you haven't yet, please cancel my subscription right away.

To reiterate, I won't provide you with my personal information. 
That's incredibly shady on your side, to be honest.

Then I got an Account Denied message.

We are sorry, but after reviewing your sign up details, we cannot issue 
an account at this time.
Thank you for your interest in IPVanish.com.

As well as this:

Your account has been set to an inactive status - effective immediately,
and the refund request has been made. Your credit card will not be charged again.
Please allow 7-10 business days for any refund to appear on your credit card.
We appreciate your business; if you have suggestions on how we can improve
our service, please let us know.

So in fact, yes, I do have suggestions.

  1. For IPVanish, trust your customers or do your business elsewhere.
  2. For IPVanish, do not advertise falsely claiming you protect the privacy of your users.
  3. For the users, AVOID IPVANISH LIKE THE PLAGUE.
2

This business has massive amounts of fraud. It is not unusual to have hundreds of suspicious transactions per day. Getting labeled as supporting criminal enterprises is very bad for business. Lets not even get into the transaction costs associated with dozens of chargebacks a month, and having to revoke accounts and the customer service load associated with getting angry calls from people who had their card numbers stolen through some phishing site.

We have asked for additional information before as well, but nowhere near this invasive. We usually just want the user to take a photo of the physical card with everything but the name, bank, and last 4 of the card covered up.

3

I understand the precautions and don’t mind providing additional information - as long as it does not invade my privacy or leaks my pesonal details. The thing is I don’t like being labaled a fraud, while 1) having my card charged, 2) getting asked for potentially sell-able information, 3) not being clear if the subscription has been canceled or is running.

I have to admit I got annoyed, but let this be a fair warning for the regular users who learnt about the service via Lifehacker or a similar site.

4

Yeah, we have some proprietary measures to prevent fraud that work very well that do not involve user interaction, and a relatively good detection system for suspicious transactions. We rarely ask anyone to verify these days. If we do ask someone to verify, we allow the account to work until the verification process completes.

When we first started up in early beta, it was a serious issue.