People who help you break rules will break other rules too. In other news, water is wet.
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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That reminds me. There was a story about a cheater who sold tools for disrupting multiplayer games and it was pretty popular.
Then he added a crypto miner in there which went undetected for a long time and then he ghost.
If you actually read the article, this is just a normal-ish (although peer-to-peer, which is interesting) free VPN, it isn't actually oriented towards cheating. The funniest part is that if the article is to be believed, the "cheating" consists of simply increasing your ping. Which... you don't really need a VPN for.
TL;DR: They used free VPN called Big Mama.
From their FAQ: https://bigma.org/faq.html
How is it possible to keep it free?
The devices of our free VPN customers are used to create a secure peer-to-peer network that our commercial clients can use to securely route their traffic via various global endpoints. As a free client, you will likely not notice any impact on your resources as that happens. The data transferred in the background will be metered by your mobile operator according to your data plan.
So it's literally up front and in their FAQ that they do this. So why is this a story?
Because scary words!
What does this mean? What use would "their clients" need access to your network? What are they routing to through your network and how does that help with efficiency?
IP addresses.
Their commercial clients are doing things that give IPs bad reputation or banned from services, so they use this service to get access to home IPs to use.
So scammers and similar ilk?
It would not shock me if companies like OpenAi would have used something like this so they could harvest large amounts of data without setting off usage limits. While sketchy not sure if this counts as scammy.
Innovation when big tech does it, breaking ToS when Joe Doe does it
This is actually almost always the case with free VPNs.
If you look at residential IP providers, they have MILLIONS of IPs available to them.
100%, “free” is never free
They got malware cheating? Good.
Ha ha
It's hola all over again