VPNSecure Lifetime Subscriptions: Now You Didn’t License What You Licensed, Either
from the money-for-nothing dept
We’ve talked about how, in the digital space at least, the concept of “ownership” has undergone a massive philisophical shift. It used to be that you would go out somewhere, buy a thing, and own that thing. When the product is digital, however, or if it is connected to the internet and subject to firmware and software updates that change the product post purchase, you never really own the product. In fact, according to most EULAs and the like, you merely “license” the product. That means the thing you bought on Monday may not be the product or service you actually get on Friday, if the manufacturer or maker decides to make a change. And the response you get from industry is a reminder that you didn’t buy a thing; you bought a limited license to a thing that can be altered, rescinded, or bricked at the maker’s whim.
It’s a dystopia that we’ve come to accept, unfortunately. But you get to a whole new level of absurd when you don’t actually own the license you bought, either. More specifically, when you buy a “lifetime license” to a VPN service, only to have the company be sold and the new owners yank that lifetime subcription from you without prior notice.
The new owners of VPN provider VPNSecure have drawn ire after canceling lifetime subscriptions. The owners told customers that they didn’t know about the lifetime subscriptions when they bought VPNSecure, and they cannot honor the purchases.
A copy of the email from “The VPN Secure Team” and posted on Reddit notes that VPNSecure had previously deactivated accounts with lifetime subscriptions that it said hadn’t been used in “over 6 months.” The message noted that VPNSecure was acquired in 2023, “including the technology, domain, and customer database—but not the liabilities.”
It gets worse. According to the new owners, they claim the sellers didn’t even tell them about these lifetime subscriptions and that usage and support requests for them were saturating the service, all sans any income for the new ownership. How true any of that is would be completely unknown to this writer, obviously, but it’s also besides the point. If the seller obfuscated usership in the sale, that should be taken up with the seller. The current owners claim they can’t do that because the costs of a lawsuit would outpace what they spent on the purchase to begin with. Which, hey, that sucks pretty hard if all of this is true, but I’m failing to see why that should keep in purchases made in good faith from being honored.
Unfortunately, the previous owner did not disclose that thousands of Lifetime Deals (LTDs) had been sold through platforms like StackSocial.
We discovered this only months later—when a large portion of our resources were strained by these LTD accounts and high support volume from users, who through part of the database, provided no sustaining income to help us improve and maintain the service.
We actually offered VPNSecure lifetime subscriptions in one of our own “Daily Deal” posts. There is a lot of disbelief floating out there about just what these new owners knew about these subscriptions and when they knew it. It’s important to note that checking the history of the VPNSecure website doesn’t reveal that lifetime subs were ever offered there. Instead, they appear to have been offered through third parties like StackCommerce, which is who Techdirt partners with. When we asked StackCommerce directly about this whole fiasco, we were provided with this statement.
“As a marketplace, StackCommerce connects consumers with exclusive digital deals offered by third-party providers. While we strive to curate high-quality, long-term offers, we do not own or operate the products sold through our platform. In rare cases where a provider is acquired or discontinues operations, we unfortunately have no control over how those new entities choose to honor existing agreements. We understand the frustration this can cause and are actively working with impacted customers to offer support and explore possible solutions.”
Any real due diligence by the new owners should have uncovered all of this. If they didn’t do their jobs as part of the acquisition, well, sucks for them.
Again, how that translates into ripping away a subscription from a customer who bought them in good faith is beyond me. How those subs were discontinued without notice, with emails going out to those affected only after the complaints started rolling in, is also a valid question and a method for assuredly pissing people off.
VPNSecure could’ve potentially mitigated backlash by giving users more advanced warning of the changes and a longer opportunity to select a new subscription before deactivating their accounts. We can’t confirm if InfiniteQuant Ltd. knew about the lifetime subscriptions before making its purchase. However, the firm claims to have known about the subscriptions a few months after taking ownership, so it had ample time to warn customers before abruptly deactivating “dormant” accounts and killing the subscriptions of thousands of customers.
So if we don’t own what we’ve bought, and we don’t even own the licenses under the terms we bought them either, then what exactly are we getting whenever we hand over the money we’ve earned?
Filed Under: licenses, lifetime deals, ownership, vpns
Companies: infinitequant, stackcommerce, vpnsecure
Comments on “VPNSecure Lifetime Subscriptions: Now You Didn’t License What You Licensed, Either”
The right to get metaphorically bent over and fucked up the ass by a corporation.
Re:
I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Timothy made several references to “subs”.
It’s simple.
A corporation owes you a service or good? Go fuck yourself.
You owe them? They can carve you up for slaughter and sell you and everything you own.
Look at how all over payments are handled. Bank, work, etc all have a right to claw back the money. You do the same? Tough luck, too bad.
Re:
I actually kind of like the idea of selling off these lifetime subscription “debts” to debt collectors. Although the company is outside the USA, perhaps the collectors could garnish credit card payments coming from or through the USA to this company.
Any Basic Accounting Would Have Sufficed
Bought the company without doing a forensic audit of the books? Fascinating.
Not even a fundamental review of the numbers?
You know? Income. Broken out by source?
What about Memberships?
Nobody evaluated the actual member database?
I’m sitting here thinking how utterly ridiculous and simultaneously actually plausible that is.
They’re either idiots, con artists, or both.
Infinite Quant
lol
Those “lifetime” subs actually were good for 10 year terms. I had one of them. I asked when I first got it what happens when that 10 years are up, and they said “you can contact us to reset it.” Granted, this was with the prior owners like 7 years ago.
They could have easily just let the current “lifetime” account terms run their course, then make people migrate.
It would have been much better from a PR standpoint.
It wasn’t necessarily a problem for me that they terminated it. I honestly didn’t expect it to even last the entire 10 years, but the cut off without prior notice is what irritated me.
As a customer, I don’t care about the blame game. You broke a deal, proved you can’t be trusted, and my business will go elsewhere. It’s that simple.
they are lucky
Some purchasers of licenses which are abruptly terminated without cause or refund might be inclined to sue them. It is the the buying corporation’s good fortune that the VPN-Secure licensees are not so inclined.
Well, companies can go out of business and stop offering services. They can sell off their assets as part of winding down the company. That ought to be OK because there’s a process involved, debts and obligations need to be settled and everyone knows well in advance of the process finishing.
The problem here is that VPNSecure didn’t go out of business. They sold all their assets but_not_ the obligations and liabilities. Then they went out of business. This frankly ought not to be legal. The law ought to be changed so that if a company sells all or substantially all of it’s assets, or such a substantial portion of them that it can no longer continue in business, the result is a sale of the company and all buyers of the assets are jointly and severally liable for all debts and obligations of the company.
Re:
With respect to an individual customer contract, you can not pick the contract elements you like and leave the others behind. When you accept the “lifetime” customer as your customer, you have to honour their contract.
I do see a class action lawsuit possibility here.
(Note: If they just left the lifetime customers in a shell company to be shut down over time, we had a different legal situation. Not one without recourse for the customers, but one that requires a different harder to prove legal approach.)
Re:
Except that, apparently, they did sell the obligations along with the service. The new owners just decided not to honor them.
It’s probably already illegal. But it’s not so easy to sue. The article says the company used to be Australian, and is now incorporated in Dubai but being operated from the Bahamas. It also says the lifetime subscriptions were advertised for $40 and $28 at various times (with “$1,194” being the regular price). I guess one could sue for the new “regular price” of $79.92/year, for each year of one’s remaining actuarial lifetime, but what lawyer’s gonna handle an international case for such little payout? (Does anyone happen to know a good UAE class-action firm that will work on contingency?)
Re: Re:
From what I’ve read of the terms, they didn’t sell the obligations, at least not legally speaking. They did send all the data along with the hardware and the buyer just kept servicing the customers as if they had a contract, but the contract of sale left the customer contracts with VPNSecure to be dissolved when it went out of business after the sale.
Most people would assume that how the buyer behaved after the sale would automatically transfer the contracts regardless of what the terms of the sale said. That would be incorrect. That’s what trips people up about legal documents: there are rules about how things operate and definitions of what words and phrases mean, and those rules and definitions have jack-all to do with everyday assumptions about them. That’s why you get a lawyer to review legal documents, they know the rules and definitions. And why any decent lawyer would, after reading most consumer contracts for services, recommend you not sign them because they don’t include things like terms stating what happens if the company no longer can provide those services. In fact the contract would come back from the lawyer dripping red ink with a post-it on the front saying “Oh HELL no!”.
Re: customers
I thnk customer accounts are generally viewed as assets. The buyer got the customer accounts. That is necessarily a part of the VPN system, because it does not work without customer accounts.
It is accepted in some businesses that there is an actual cost to acquiring a customer. Some businesses are therefore motivated to treat customers well, and view their customer accounts as very important assets.
This seems like something that subscribers would be able to sue over. The new owners have to uphold the deals that the previous owners made, and I doubt “We didn’t know” would fly in court.
Asset purchase agreement
Nobody gets to but arts without liabilities. If you have a lifetime sub file suit. Even in small claims court.
Whether or not they did their due diligence is not your problem. You were sold a service. You paid for it. Hind them to it.
Buy assets not but parts. Damn ai.
There’s no trust left in private companies at all. When you buy something now and it needs any sort of activation or connection you have to assume it may be a big brick by tomorrow or simply cease to exist/be taken away from you.
Enshitification intensifies.
These corporations want to have it both ways
When it comes to IP then it’s their property that they own absolutely. When it comes to you buying something from them you absolutely don’t own it.
Ownership is murky, so ..
Is anyone sure that the “new” owners are not really another entity that is owned by the “old” users? Conveniently discarding those lifetime subscriptions?
“It gets worse. According to the new owners, they claim the sellers didn’t even tell them about these lifetime subscriptions and that usage and support requests for them were saturating the service, all sans any income for the new ownership.”
I would say they have a good case to sue the people who sold them the rights to the brand, but they also have the job of due diligence. Now they could have to pay for a defense if people choose to do a class action lawsuit. How worth it would it be to the users? I don’t know. It certainly wouldn’t be cheap for the new owners.
Weird how the principle of ‘caveat emptor’ (buyer beware) applies to end-user buyers, but when it’s a company buying another company, the buck gets passed.
If the previous owner sold the assets and held the liabilities, sue them now, before the sale money is gone. Also, sue the current owners and find out for sure who is responsible. It sounds like this deal was written on a napkin, if it was written at all.
Not their problem
As the owners stated, they purchased the assets of the company, not their liabilities. This is perfectly legal. I actually worked for a manufacturing company who bought another company and did exactly that. The payment to the original company would be used to pay off any outstanding debt and, if any money were left, they owners could do with it whatever they wanted. Or, they might file bankruptcy if they still did not have enough to pay their creditors.
However, by law, the new owner of the assets is not required to honor any of the previous owners’ agreements.
Does that make it right? I guess that depends on how you look at it. As a consumer, I completely understand the outrage.
But, looking at it from a business perspective, I also understand why the purchasing company would not want to be held responsible for the poor decisions of the previous owners. Because of this, I don’t think anyone suing the new owners will get anywhere.
The only other option I see is the company original company goes out of business and everyone loses access to the services they paid for.
I don’t see a really good answer for any of this. Either option sucks.
Re:
Okay, but if the liabilities weren’t bought, doesn’t that mean the seller still owns them and is responsible for somehow providing the “lifetime” subscriptions? Unless and until they make a valid bankruptcy filing.
This is why we have bankruptcy laws. Pretty much every country allows for some form of debt reorganization, as opposed to total liquidation. The buyer would go to the court and tell them it’s absurd that a one-time $28 payment, not disclosed by the seller, requires them to provide a service, forever, that normally sells for like $30-120/year; and this is gonna bankrupt the company. It’s then up to the court to evaluate the merits of this argument and decide which remedies, if any, are reasonable. Early termination of long-term contracts is always on the table.
In general, contracts are binding on successors, who can’t just terminate them unilaterally and arbitrarily. Not that I’d be surprised if this is the “standard internet service contract”, in which a customer gives money and maybe the provider gives them service, maybe not, who knows?; anything can be canceled at any time and for any reason or no reason, but only by the provider.
StackSkills
Techdirt makes money by selling lifetime subscriptions via stackskills. Isn’t that a bit hypocritical?
Re:
I actually got mine through TechDirt, now that you mention it.
However, after noticing the scammy/scummy behavior of stacksocial “deals”, I don’t buy from them anymore, unless it’s physical goods.
The Office licenses they sell are illegal (or gray market at best), as the versions they sell are not available for individual purchasing. Once I noticed that, I soured on them.
Re:
No, because Techdirt honors the obligations it voluntarily enters into, unlike VPNSecure.
“then what exactly are we getting whenever we hand over the money we’ve earned?”
I think we all have an answer to that one but it’s anatomically impolite to describe. My question though is given recent stories of clawing back funds from bank accounts, do we even really own the money we earned?
Different cover, same story.
This isn’t the first time that a company has claimed it purchased assets without the accompanying liabilities.
Disney claimed to have done so when they bought up the publishing rights to various star wars novels.
Wall Street seems to be addicted to it..
It’s not going to stop until the law or the courts say GTFO.
That sounds like a "you" problem
If a company purchases another then they should be responsible for all assets as well as debts and obligations of the purchased property. The new company should NOT be able to simply refuse to honor the obligation for lifetime accounts, but should rather go after the sellers in civil court to recover the lost company value which these accounts represent.