Lots of fraudulent activity since purchasing Hotspot Shield Elite

VPN
1

I hope this is allowed here, I want to make sure nobody gets screwed over. I recently purchased the elite plan from Hotspot Shield, roughly 2 weeks ago. I used my credit card for this purchase as I wasn’t 100% sure on how reputable it is. This is the only thing I have used my credit card for in months, and my card always stays at home. Today I was met with thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges from allllll over the US. Thankfully my bank was stellar with everything (thank you USAA), but I just wanted to give you guys a heads up. Some of the charges were for other VPN services, cell service in Mexico, hundreds of dollars in pizza, games, and retail stores. After I noticed these charges, I started noticing weird emails and notifications only for accounts I have used while accessing the VPN. I started noticing login attempts from other countries, etc. I am so thankful I used my credit card for this. I have since had to change all of my passwords and setup 2 step on everything I could. I highly recommend you avoid this software, do not risk it.

Edit: woke up the next morning to fraudulent charges to my debit card also. I very rarely come in contact with people other than my family due to my night job. I find it highly unlikely someone physically took my cards, especially since I’m getting international charges. I did have my cards saved in chrome, maybe they were able to pull that data through since I was using that browser and was signed into my account while using the hotspot shield VPN service. I’ve since changed all my passwords, removed all saved data in chrome and gmail, reset my entire PC that I had the software installed on, and changed both of my cards and removed the money from the account into a different bank account only I have access to. I think I should be good to go from here on. What a pain in the ass!

2

Thanks for the warning!

3

Interesting… Due to other reasons i didn’t buy them nor would I, now glad I didn’t.

4

Thanks for posting this! I am looking into VPN services and, man, I didn’t even think how hairy this all could get.

5

Nickcantwaite - Thanks for bringing this to our attention and hello from the HotspotShield Team. We are sorry to hear about the situation with your credit card institution as this is not the kind of experience we strive for with our users. Anchorfree is required by the associations to be certified PCI compliant and while we have not heard of any additional complaints we would like to further investigate yours specifically. Kindly send me a DM here with your email address used for elite, the transaction amount and date and we’ll dig deeper. This will help us further investigate your transaction in question.

6

Replying to Hotspot means you no longer anonymous?

7

This same exact thing happened to me. Not only that, my VPN is constantly telling me to upgrade my account even though I paid in full for a year. Their customer service also doesn’t reply at all.

8

Anytime! Thanks for the advice on posting over here :slight_smile:

9

I appreciate the offer to investigate but I will pass, I just went through so much crap to get this all fixed. I don’t want to mess anything else up honestly. I don’t feel safe providing any information, even if you probably already have it. I’ll just suffer the loss of the $20 I paid and move on. I’ve spent 2 days fixing this, I don’t want to mess with it anymore.

10

Ok. Feel free to reach out to us if at anytime you have any questions or concerns. More than happy to help.

11

Same exact issue. Stolen credit card right after I signed up, which hasn’t happened to me ever before.