Again, that's not extortionate for a mid-length plan, it's still not exactly what we'd call a cheap VPN. Sign up for 12 months and you'll pay $4.17 a month. That's quite expensive, but not quite the highest price we've seen.Īs always, longer plans work out much cheaper. Sign up for a single month with iTop VPN and it'll cost your $11.99. ITop VPN price: how much is it, and is there a iTop VPN free trial? None of that proves anything malicious is happening, but it suggests to us that this isn't a developer who in any way deserves your trust. There's no attempt to explain this to users, no website with a detailed back story, and no obvious reason why this service is being given away for free. Put all this together and the upshot is that we seem to have someone in China setting up a UK company, apparently doing nothing with it, but using its name and UK origin to push VPN products under multiple brands, sometimes with very implausible claims. HideMe claims to have a website at This didn't host a website during testing, but checking showed that in 2017 HideMe was saying it had 'invented a new VPN protocol that works great in regions where traditional VPNs are blocked.' Mysteriously, the firm doesn’t seem to explain what this is, or why it doesn’t mention it in the app store pages, or why it isn’t boasting about this breakthrough on security news websites. Searching for references to revealed that the developer is also behind the Chrome extension FreeVPN Proxy by HideMe (not to be confused with, an entirely legitimate commercial VPN provider). But it's also possible that the company is being used to make it appear that the VPN has a UK business behind it, rather than being the product of an individual from China. Perhaps the developer wanted to do something with the company and just never got around to it. Browsing Companies House revealed that Tigervpns Ltd is registered as a UK company, but the director and shareholder is named as Jiazeng Wang from Shanghai, China, and as we write Companies House lists it as 'non-trading' and apparently based at an accommodation address. Having a developer that is part of a UK limited company sounds reassuring, but we wanted to find out more. But there's no mention of anything else the company does, and the two company domains – and – don't host any website. A caption refers to Tigervpns (UK), and a Tigervpns Ltd Facebook page refers to FreeVPN Proxy as a new service it has built. Although the website was the copyright and email message points to Tigervpns (not TigerVPN, an entirely legitimate commercial VPN service from Slovakia). The confusion continued when we tried to find out who was behind the site. Is this the developer behind FreeVPN Proxy, or is FreeVPN Proxy linking to these apps because they're open source? The site doesn't say. The site contained a single web page listing news stories sourced from RFI (Radio France Internationale), various Google ads and a Get Free VPN button - nothing about the service, at all.Ĭlicking Get Free VPN opened the same GitHub page we'd encountered earlier, with basic descriptions and download links for Windows and Mac clients. Our next step was to try to find out more about the developer by heading off to its website, But, well, it didn't help much. Sounds good, but as these are just the words of a GitHub user called 'JJQQKK', and don't even reference FreeVPN Proxy, we weren't satisfied. A Privacy Policy (hosted on GitHub, oddly) claims the service only records your IP address, inbound and outbound data totals during a session, and deletes these when the session ends. The extension's Chrome store page claims that 'no log is saved from any users'. Could this be logging your online activities? This doesn't guarantee your anonymity, of course, because your traffic is being redirected through a server chosen by the developer.
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