Anonymity, forwarded ports and payments.

[MrCircinus 0]

Hello,

I've been searching for a document on how payment information is handled at AirVPN but I couldn't find one. If a customer pays with Paypall/Credit Card/crypto, what data is retained by the AirVPN accounting service and is that data linked to the technical account in such a way that the knowledge of a forwarded portnumber could lead to the payment information and identity of the user?  

I realize the local police has seldoms shown interest in individual downloaders but that doesn't rule out a symbolic action on a European level so local police is forced to assist and if you are caught in the net ... Even if there are no logs, it is trivial for a state actor to make a record of ingress traffic based on portnumber and even correlate it with egress traffic. If that portnumber leads to an account that contains payment information, there is an issue. I gladly give up any possibility for refunds if that means that the technical account only contains the "valid until" date and there is no link between payment info and the technical account. 

One of the things I respect about that Swedish Provider is the way they are transparent about the handling of payment information. Their investment in selling physical cards with a coupon code at Amazon makes it impossible for anyone to link payment information to the account of a customer. You buy a physical card at Amazon that is shipped to your home. The card contains a coupon code that is protected in much the same way as the pin codes you receive from bank. You add the coupon code to your account and you are good to go. There is never a digital link between payment information and the coupon code. Amazon can hand over the names of the people who bought the physical cards but they don't now the coupon codes. The VPN provider verifies the coupon code but has no idea who bought it. Since this also the suggestion thread on the forum, I hope AirVPN will investigate a similar approach. 

Thanks for reading. 

[Ye-Ji 1]

This thread from some time ago might be of interest to you: 

[fsy 34]

18 hours ago, MrCircinus said:

Amazon can hand over the names of the people who bought the physical cards ... I hope AirVPN will investigate a similar approach.

To me this system is a naive ersatz of poor quality. Why let Amazon profile you as a specific VPN customer, and why donate to Amazon an entire VPN provider's customer database, when you can pay directly without intermediaries with Monero or Bitcoin? To me it's just another nonsense by the same people who have also abolished port forwarding with specious motivations, if I caught right the provider you wrote about.