> 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?
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.
I don't have any evidence I can point to. However, I can reference the hundreds of millions of dollars processed through various payment systems I oversaw to state that if you were trying to pay through a VPN, it would classified as extremely high risk, and outside of a few extenuating circumstances, we'd simply deny the transaction.
When researching the various scoring mechanisms, we generally find that the VPN was generally just used for masking purposes, so we'd see multiple attempts go through using multiple names and addresses.
Also, the chances of getting a stolen card response back from the bank was much higher.
This isn't to say that a VPN means you are a thief. What it does mean, however, is that the risk far outweighs the potential benefits.
Isn't paying through a VPN a rather different matter to paying for a VPN? I mean, there's no point to using a privacy VPN to hide your identity only to then give out your credit card details, so it sounds like an inherently biased scenario.
If you are going to use a VPN to charge stolen credit cards, you sure aren't going to use a real credit card to purchase the VPN service, which could then be linked back to you.
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.
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.
I would say that any claim is bold if it is surprising or apparently important, and is not covered by multiple mainstream sources.
Examples are claims of majority (A majority of people are suffering from sickness A, B, or C), Or claims of superiority (My car is the fastest in the world).
The problem is that the only people with data are the Credit Card companies and the VPN providers, and they both have dogs in this fight. We wouldn't believe the numbers they released, if they released numbers, which they probably won't...
So we're left with anecdote and personal opinions to base our decisions on. There's plenty of opinion in this thread - a few anecdotes won't hurt.
Chargebacks are bad for the VPN company. They cost $15 each.
Even if they cost nothing, a high ratio of chargebacks is not in the best interest of the credit card companies, who are at the top of the value chain. So chargebacks are bad for anybody along the chain.