Scam watch: flagged, dead & watch-listed
VPN services that died, vanished, or were flagged as scams. The market churns hard: brands get bought, merged, sunset or run with the money. If a provider you paid for is on this list, the archived review documents what happened.
Flagged scam (0)
| none |
Dead - not operating (27)
| Streisand VPN megascript unpublished Grand unified self-host script; effectively unmaintained since ~2019, superseded by Algo/Amnezia. | – |
|---|---|
| Tenta VPN unpublished Privacy-focused browser+VPN (ESW Capital-era); effectively retired. | United States |
| Blockless unpublished Canadian Smart DNS; defunct. | Canada |
| IronSocket unpublished Ex-Hide My Ass competitor of the 2013 era; wound down (per sibling-site research 2024). | Hong Kong |
| OverPlay unpublished Ziff Davis family Smart DNS; discontinued. | United States |
| Unblock-Us unpublished Early Smart DNS pioneer; defunct. | Canada |
| UnoTelly unpublished Canadian Smart DNS; defunct. | Canada |
| 911 S5 unpublished Massive botnet-powered residential SOCKS5 market; FBI/Europol seizure operations (2022-2024) killed it - successors (skip-hop proxies) live | China |
| Atlas VPN unpublished Nord Security's budget sister brand; announced shutdown March 2024, service ended April 2024. Site now quota-blocked/dead (checked 2026- | United States |
| BulletVPN unpublished VERIFIED LIVE 2026-09-27: homepage shows 'BulletVPN End of Life - no longer available'. Confirmed dead; pay lifetime money, get a to | United Arab Emirates |
| DoubleVPN unpublished Seized by law enforcement (Europol/Taskforce, 2021) for serving ransomware operators. The 'more hops = safer' marketing was a false | – |
| FrootVPN unpublished 'Free forever' 2014-era P2P VPN that went paid then vanished; kept as defunct exemplar. | Sweden |
| LiquidVPN unpublished Small US provider that effectively stopped operating; kept as defunct. | United States |
| OneVPN unpublished Bundled-lifetime seller from the ~2016 era; dead. | Hong Kong |
| Privatix unpublished 2018 ICO-era dVPN that faded after the token pump; kept as defunct. | – |
| SpyOff unpublished Small Swiss-branded service quietly retired; traffic mostly migrated to bigger brands. | Switzerland |
| Substratum Node unpublished ICO hype-era 'decentralized internet'; collapsed ~2019; kept as defunct exemplar. | – |
| SwissVPN unpublished Very early Swiss VPN (2005+); defunct. | Switzerland |
| VIP72 unpublished Infamous criminal-ecosystem SOCKS service tied to Bankbot/botnet fraud; long dead/seized. | China |
| VPN by Google One unpublished Google shut it down in June 2024 (folded into 'Dark web report'/AI features). Kept as a warning: free big-tech VPNs die on product-o | United States |
| ibVPN unpublished Long-running Romanian provider; strong signs of wind-down (product merged into smart-DNS sister sites, support silent). Verify before recomm | Romania |
| McAfee Safe Connect VPN unpublished A checkbox VPN built to upsell an antivirus, and the dossier's evidence tells one story three times: Security.org (7.5/10, 'one of t | United States - operated by McAfee, LLC (Delaware LLC, HQ 6220 America Center Drive, San Jose, California), owned since 1 March 2022 by an investor group led by Advent International and Permira (with CPP Investments, GIC, ADIA); TunnelBear (acquired 2018) is a sister VPN |
| Proxy.sh unpublished Seychelles 'ethical' anonymity provider of the 2013-2017 era; long dead. | Seychelles |
| SaferVPN unpublished A textbook case of a mid-tier VPN surviving three ownership regimes and then being switched off: founded 2013 in Tel Aviv by the future Peri | Israel at birth - Safer Social Ltd., 26 Nachmani St., Tel Aviv (PCWorld 2018); J2 Global's Q3 2019 acquisition notice lists 'SaferVPN (certain assets) - Cloud Services - VPN (Israel)'. From 2019 Q3 the brand belonged to J2 Global (NASDAQ: JCOM), which renamed itself Ziff Davis (NASDAQ: ZD, New York) in 2021. On 2023-12-06 customers were emailed that SaferVPN ends 2023-12-15 and accounts were moved to sister brand StrongVPN (Wikipedia; faun.dev). CURRENT state 2026-11-03: the SaferVPN brand is dead; the successor brands StrongVPN/IPVanish/Encrypt.me remain owned by Ziff Davis, which in 2026 sold its Connectivity division (Ookla, Speedtest, Downdetector, Ekahau, RootMetrics) to Accenture for $1.2B but retained its cybersecurity/VPN brands |
| Perfect Privacy unpublished A 2026 obituary for a pioneer: Perfect Privacy (since 2008) sold genuine privacy engineering - 4-server cascades, NeuroRouting, TrackStop, R | Switzerland |
| Ivacy Effectively a discontinued brand absorbed by its own competitor: 'Ivacy Powered by PureVPN' no longer sells new Ivacy subscriptions | Singapore |
| ZenMate A brand in palliative care that still markets like it's 2018: ZenMate's own announcement closed new signups on March 16, 2023, kille | United Kingdom / Israel |
Under watch (2)
| Cryptostorm cryptostorm.is is verifiably LIVE (fetched 2026-09-29, HTTP 200) with a PGP-signed warrant canary dated July 1, 2026 and an unbroken Wayback | Iceland |
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| Calyx VPN CalyxVPN is one of the very few genuinely free, genuinely anonymous VPNs - no account, no email, open-source client and server, run by a res | United States - The Calyx Institute, a New York 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded 2010, HQ 254 36th Street Suite C660, Brooklyn, NY 11232 (privacy policy fetched 2026-11-03); a Five Eyes jurisdiction; the VPN is one program of the institute alongside CalyxOS and Tor activities |