In support of Ukraine - free VPN access to Ukrainian and Russian citizens
this is awesome. kudos
Proud of you guys. Cheers
Great, but for the apple products ivpn is blocked for downloading in Russia.
Due to unexpected level of abuse we are pausing this offer now. Frankly, we did not expect people will spam and abuse a plan to support citizens of an invaded country. We know better now. We aim to restart this program very soon. Blog post updated.
Yes, this is a limitation for iOS devices.
Sadly, I’m not surprised it was abused. If you take a step back and view the VPNscape from afar, you’ll realize that the majority of people just want something to stream or torrent, with a significant number simply looking for “free shit” via stolen login credentials, shared accounts, etc.
Where I live, you even see various VPN subscriptions being sold on Amazon-like e-commerce apps where people pay a small fee for a year’s worth of access to a “Top 10 VPN” provider account - the seller basically buys a plan and splits it depending on the number of concurrent devices allowed. Privacy and security is the last thing on the buyer’s mind.
That’s one reason why I suggested you guys deploy separate instances in the other thread. That way, you just send them the config(s) or one-tap profiles for mobile devices via the email exchange (which is hopefully PGP encrypted).
Your ideas are good, however we were looking for solution we can announce quickly. The abuse was problematic for account unlocks - we have received a lot more requests from ineligible regions than from Ukraine/Russia in the past 24Hs, so separate instances would not have solved this issue.
Thanks for replying. It’s unfortunate that people take advantage of genuine goodwill, but I suppose it’s commonplace these days. Just keep on plugging away. Best of luck, and wishing safety for the Ukraine members of the IVPN team.