AN OVERVIEW OF THE GROWING THREAT
Approximately 20% of the world’s global population are being either directly or potentially set up for the Chinese government to collect all of their private emails, messenger conversations, personal records, as well as the psychological information that could be assessed from that data. The potential harvesting of this VPN data should concern us all.
“Everyone sees what you appear to be, and few experience what you really are.” ― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
CHINA CAN ACCESS 20% OF THE WORLD’S PRIVATE DATA
There are 4.57 billion Internet users in the world.i 31% of those use a VPN.ii Upon reviewing a sample size of 30 popular VPNs, we can estimate that approximately 62% of those are secretly Chinese-owned VPNs currently installed on 878,354,000 consumer user devices.iii Thus, we can estimate with arithmetic the following:
(4,570,000,000 Internet users x 31% VPN users) x 62% Chinese-owned VPNs
= 878,354,000 Chinese-owned VPNs installed on user devices worldwide.
In 2020, 29% of Americans reported using a VPN for personal use (up from 11% in 2019). Of the 275 million Internet users in the US, this means that 39 million Americans may be sharing embarrassing, personal, or otherwise secret data with China. Earlier this year, a number of VPN company databases were breached and leaked; these VPNs claimed to not keep user logs, yet they did. UFO VPN, based out of Hong Kong, is among them. The total amount of log data leaked exceeds one terabyte. In other words, simply because a VPN claims to not have logs does not mean they can be trusted on their word, when the CCP is involved. iv
STATE ACTORS SNOOPING ON AMERICANS IN THE VPN SPACE?
The free world’s vulnerability to shady VPNs is evident in all levels of the industry, including top market share companies. It is very hard to raise capital to start a business. It is very hard to run a business once that capital has been raised. It is almost impossible to raise capital for a business with political goals that run counter to the profit motive. Ergo, when VPN businesses get political, we may consider that smoke indicates a fire, with fire being evidence that the business in question may be a state-supported surreptitious operation designed to collect mass population data. Let’s start with the most obvious facts. VPNs make money pursuing the following markets, with video streaming at the top.
If one were to start a VPN business, the foremost priority would be to maximize profit by focusing on the largest segment of users: video streaming by circumventing geo-blocking. If a VPN were to go against the grain and seek out more fickle, suspicious, and narrowly focused customers, one could argue this is not the best use of capital. When businesses start to move away from focusing on profit, they may raise red flags as supporting state actor initiatives: or aligning with them. Express VPN is one of those curious cases.
Express VPN is a Hong Kong company that is officially registered as a company in the British Virgin Islands. Using Internet Archive, we can see that they used to announce their place of business as Hong Kong.v For more than a decade they obscured their ties to Hong Kong, China, through an offshore shell company in the British Virgin Islands (ie. a shell company that exists only on paper).
In terms of market share, Express VPN ranks in the top 5 in the United States and the world.vi Their daily user number comes close to 5 and 15 million users per day.
The above suggests Express VPN earned 50 million and 150 million dollars per month at an average subscription price of $10 per month. Despite this their BVI companies appears to report less than 0.1038 million in sales while we can estimate real revenue reaching 600 million to 1.2 billion in revenue per year, just not recorded in their offshore company in the BVI that they swear is their headquarters. See “Express VPN Inconsistencies.”vii Let’s look at their recruiter, Nicholas Lui, employee of Network Guard.
It would appear that he has done recruiting for both Network Guard as well as ExpressVPN. Additionally, it appears that both share the same office, as evidenced in our write up about Express VPN. This is where it gets more interesting. If we go to https://chengbao.com.hk/ it redirects us to https://networkguard.com/. (Chengbao is Mandarin for “fortress.”)
- Employees of Chengbao and Express populate the NG logo; when we click on NG on either profile both go to Network Guard. Network Guard has Express VPN Employees all over their activities. They also share stock photos from the same office.
- Chengbao Ltd may be the de facto operating company for Express VPN, and Express VPN is a worthless British Virgin Islands shell company reducing, their fair share of taxes with their earnings reporting not reflecting the scale of their business making up a broad segment of the international VPN market share.