Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers

Keep in mind that this is about chargeback risk, not implementing some secret government policy. &quot;Anonymizing VPNs&quot; are a high risk service -- the people signing up for them are more often &quot;bad guys&quot; than tech professionals looking for privacy -- and they&#x27;re signing up with stolen payment information. There are far more hackers, crackers, carders, &quot;script kiddies&quot;, 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.<p>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.

As there is nothing remotely illegal or even nefarious about using a VPN, one can assume we&#x27;ve gone over the falls.<p>The United States and its financial system exist to serve the interests of some truly disgusting people.

And this is why technical solutions on their own are not enough. They&#x27;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&#x27;s ITAR or SOPA or PIPA or ACTA or TPP, the net effect is the same.<p>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&#x27;ll just declare such technologies illegal and harass the users.

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.<p>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.<p>Bitcoin sounds helpful for the ones not willing to use those methods, but for how long?

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 &#x27;policies&#x27; 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.

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&#x2F;MC, will now be introduced to and eventually become comfortable with Bitcoin. It&#x27;s like Visa had an all-hands meeting to come up with the best way to drive their target customers to alternative payment methods.

Bitcoin + <a href="https://www.privateinternetaccess.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.privateinternetaccess.com</a>.<p>What&#x27;s a credit card?

VPN&#x27;s are unique in providing translation from a dynamic IPv4, to multiple static IPv4. Since most ISP&#x27;s won&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s (which in practice some aren&#x27;t). However, if you are behind NAT, VPN is truly the only option for home servers.

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?<p>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.

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

I hope this pushes for stronger Bitcoin adoption!

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

Well it was only a matter of time. They don&#x27;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?

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.

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?<p>I realise I can just search for VPN providers, but I am interested in what is considered the best&#x2F;easiest&#x2F;cheapest solution.

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

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&#x27;s and crypto-currency are a huge threat to these institutions.

Article has been corrected. The problem with with the acquiring bank.

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.

You morons. Visa and mastercard are doing you a favor.<p>Who would pay an anonymizing service with credit card?!

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

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

Bitcoin users not affected. As always.

You may give <a href="https://mullvad.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mullvad.net</a> a try:<p>- You can pay cash<p>- They&#x27;re based in Europe