> 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.
(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.
And 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?
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.
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.