Windscribe banning high usage accounts

[cccthats3cs 15]

Over the past few days I have seen a lot of posts on r/Windscribe on Reddit that they are suspending/banning high usage accounts, even though it is advertised as unlimited.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windscribe/comments/1ke2n8p/account_banned/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Windscribe/comments/1kd9nmy/rip_unlimited/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Windscribe/comments/1kfn6f4/banned_without_warning_rude_response_from_support/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Windscribe/comments/1jzfb2h/warning_about_the_unlimited_data_plan_and_seeding/

The limit seems to be at the most 10 TB/month, and it's nice to see much higher usage listed on the AirVPN servers page, of course subject to the minimum 4/4 Mbps allocation as a contingency if all the bandwidth is used.

[go558a83nk 376]

24 minutes ago, breezer said:

10TB/month seems more than fair for unlimited but they should warn before banning accounts.

The article windscribe published says they do warn.  But, some people have no email associated with their account.  In that case it may seem like there's no warning but I think they'll give accounts a second chance in that case.

[fsy 37]

I have always supported Windscribe but this time I can't. Pretty sure that if Windscribe was in the EU it would have been heavily fined for deceptive advertising at the very least.
 

45 minutes ago, breezer said:

10TB/month seems more than fair for unlimited but they should warn before banning accounts.

10 TB/month is not unlimited traffic in legal terms and in common language and if you read the links you will see that it's not only 10 TB/month the amount triggering a ban, but also 1-2 TB in 3 days, which does not infringe the 10 TB/month limit by itself.

Seems clear to me that Windscribe is in serious confusion on this argument. In one of the official statements linked by OP, in order to stubbornly maintain “unlimited traffic” plain lie in their deceptive advertising, they are willing to grasp at straws, by writing that they will update their ToS with vagueness:

Quote

If you want to know what "abuse" is, it will be defined as "any activity that is substantially affecting the VPN service for other users through patterns of usage that are taking up too many resources". Yes this is vague, and it has to be, because abuse varies depending on the factors at play.

It's the first time I read that a contract "has to be vague".  Terms of Service are a legal contract. A contract must not and can not impose vague terms, on pain of its nullity and vulnerability to legal challenges. Huge embarrassment that they could have avoided by turning on their brain and studying a little more. What a disappointment, Windscribe.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, breezer said:

10TB/month seems more than fair for unlimited but they should warn before banning accounts.

Either it's unlimited or it isn't. Why not just clearly state that it's 10TB/month and not unlimited? False advertising by Windscribe.

[Crewman6639 4]

My bet is that these users are sharing their accounts, which is against the ToS. What I am guessing is happening is Windscribe is seeing suspiciously high data usage from multiple locations on one account which is flagging these users. Unsurprisingly when the user gets banned, they only tell the most favorable version of their story. 
 

On 5/9/2025 at 5:03 AM, fsy said:

Terms of Service are a legal contract. A contract must not and can not impose vague terms, on pain of its nullity and vulnerability to legal challenges.

Vagueness is fine. Courts will look at things such as reasonableness and if Windscribe is acting in good faith to determine the the validity of it. More important users already agree to 

1. indemnify themselves for any claims (have fun paying all of windscribes legal fees and getting nothing even if you do win)
2. accept that their access can be terminated for any reason (a very vague and common clause in any ToS)
3. severability (even if the court determines their definition of "abuse" is to vague and nullifies it, the rest of the ToS can still be upheld)

so it wouldn't matter anyway.

[fsy 37]

On 5/21/2025 at 10:19 PM, Crewman6639 said:

Vagueness is fine. Courts will look at things such as reasonableness and if Windscribe is acting in good faith to determine the the validity of it. More important users already agree to 

1. indemnify themselves for any claims (have fun paying all of windscribes legal fees and getting nothing even if you do win)
2. accept that their access can be terminated for any reason (a very vague and common clause in any ToS)
3. severability (even if the court determines their definition of "abuse" is to vague and nullifies it, the rest of the ToS can still be upheld)

Maybe in a banana republic where consumers can be sodomized at will. In Europe many service providers have been fined for dozens of millions EUR for false advertising on bandwidth availability and traffic consumption. Movistar, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Boygues are a few famous examples of a decade or two ago. Besides you mention vexatious unfair clauses that are void in the EU if not signed each one separately or void in any case if infringing the law.

Contract vagueness is also forbidden by the Unfair Contract Terms Directive whenever it leads, even indirectly, to unfair terms for the weaker party. Terms such as "reasonable", "material", "substantially", "without undue delay" are automatically void if they introduce imbalances to the detriment of consumers. Ambiguities must always be interpreted in favor of consumers.

Whether Windscribe can get away or not with false "unlimited traffic" advertising as it is operating according to your claims in a banana country where consumer rights are a joke and a sodomized consumer has no effective tool to defend himself or herself has nothing to do with the objectivity of misleading or false advertising and that in Europe such dirty tricks have been sanctioned severely in the last 15-20 years. Now ISPs have learned the lesson so false advertising has dropped dramatically or disappeared altogether.

However Windscribe modified extensively the tos after this incident so something was clearly wrong in the previous ones even for them in this presumed banana country. If they hadn't claimed "unlimited traffic" since the beginning they would have saved themselves this embarrassment that tarnished their image. They just had to write the truth such as "max 1 TB every 3 days and 10 TB/month" or whatever instead of this "unlimited traffic" lie.

[Mujo 0]

57 minutes ago, fsy said:

If they hadn't claimed "unlimited traffic" since the beginning they would have saved themselves this embarrassment that tarnished their image. They just had to write the truth such as "max 1 TB every 3 days and 10 TB/month" or whatever instead of this "unlimited traffic" lie.

Self-defeating attitude is puzzling. Maybe Windscribe has an infrastructure problem with metered traffic I don't know. AirVPN imposes no traffic limits and gives out 400 Gbps when 31000 users are connected on the status page. Windscribe provides only 120 Gbps when 180000 users are connected. https://windscribe.com/status/
The difference is abysmal ... an AirVPN user is using on average 9 times the bandwidth of a Windscribe user. Perhaps this is the reason for otherwise baffling behavior ?