And if they are not, they are damn deceptive. I made this post for two reasons, one, when I was considering signing on, I would have liked something to show up that Nord is a scam with evidence (when I searched “Nord VPN scam”), not just complaints about their customer service. Two, I have the evidence and feel required to share it.
After going back and forth with Nord VPN for many months, being jerked around and lied to, I finally compiled enough evidence to prove that Nord VPN is a company actively engaged in lying and deceiving customers, violating state and international privacy laws (certain as much as a non-lawyer can be), and harvesting their user data, a scam by any other name. Evidence is viewable online on my Google drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gvgtacbjKMHBoPZu7tfMowO\_gGAaG4vC?usp=drive\_link. Names are redacted for privacy, as though the employees are complicit, the root cause is corporate.
The long and short of it:
They confirmed that I requested very personally-identifiable-information containing tickets be deleted months ago, somehow having read the deleted tickets, yet they supplied me with precisely the thing I asked to be deleted two weeks prior to their confirmation. Conspicuous that they do not ask for identifying information when I ask them to delete the ticket information, unlike all of the barriers before. Regardless, they had said they would delete the tickets “at their earliest convenience”, and for a privacy company, one that requests such specific user information in their tickets and literally has a service to stop companies from data hoarding no less, holding on to my information despite my request is pretty damning. (I’m pretty sure the personal data retention is illegal under various right-to-be-deleted acts across the US and EU.) Needless to say, even if they do not keep logs on where you are browsing, which I am no longer confident of, they absolutely do keep detailed logs on you.
I hope my evidence will help warn others of Nord VPN, because even literally today, looking up items from the internet, just shows mainly complaints and usual corporate stuff, nothing out of the ordinary. I wish something like this, or just how terrible support was, showed up when I typed in “Nord VPN scam” with evidence, because it seems pretty clear to me and I find it hard to believe I am the first to notice. If you have links to share for meaningful experiences similar to this with Nord, please do.