PrivateVPN Global AB

This company refuses to provide a refund under their 30-day money back guarantee even though it is advertised on their website. On 17 December 2021, their response to Paypal was the following: "It's unclear what the customer refers to as the customer used our service and used 82 GB traffic. That can't be returned. We checked logins and the customer used our service yesterday. Based on that, we don't accept the dispute as the customer using our service right now. " Their response to Paypal is false and misleading. In their email to me on 17 December 2021, they confirm that the service wasn't, and still isn't working, because they've suspended my account due to the Paypal dispute. According to them, they always do that until matters "get resolved". Given that the dispute was filed with Paypal on 8 December 2021, I couldn't have used the service on 16 December 2021. How could I possibly log in to a suspended account? I have only escalated the dispute to Paypal because of their inability to resolve the issue. Nevertheless, that wouldn't have voided the 30-day money back guarantee. It is my understanding that a money-back guarantee, also known as a satisfaction guarantee, is essentially a simple guarantee that, if a buyer is not satisfied with a product or service, a refund will be made. Businesses cannot unilaterally suspend a plan (forfeiting their obligation to provide a working service) while refusing to provide a refund. This is particularly relevant when they promote their services as being backed by a 30-day money back guarantee. The cancellation under the 30-money guarantee was requested on 3 December 2021, without a valid response from the company to the request. My email stated "Unfortunately, the VPN stopped working on one of my laptops and mobile phones earlier today. It is unsustainable for me not to have access to a VPN service due to the potential online privacy vulnerabilities. As a result, I would like to be fully refunded for this service as I have now purchased another VPN subscription. Given that I am still under the 30-day money back guarantee provided with this VPN subscription, I don't anticipate too much of a problem to have this finalised by your company." In response to my email they ignored the request for a refund, and the email in its entirety, and stated the following: "Our engineers are currently checking on this. We will get back to you via email for updates. If you require VPN protection at this time, you may connect on the following VPN locations: Australia - Perth, Israel, Isle of Man, Russia - Moscow, Singapore, South Africa and Ukraine servers, Bangalore, India - Mumbai." In essence, a 30-day money back guarantee means ZERO to this company. Despite the fact that this business clearly advertises that "all plans are protected by a 100% money back guarantee". In Sweden, the general rules regarding misleading advertising are set out in the Marketing Act. According to these rules, which are similar to what occurs in Australia, advertisers are not allowed to use false claims or other misleading statements in their marketing. Advertising is considered to be misleading and false if it affects the consumer's ability to make an informed transactional decision. Advertisers are furthermore not allowed to leave out any material information that is of importance and that may result in unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or otherwise inappropriate advertising. PrivateVPN claims to keep absolutely no logs of your data. And in their privacy policy, they do verify that they don't keep user logs of your internet traffic. However, they do collect your IP address and cookies. They even claim that sites may not load correctly on their servers if you disable cookies. Even worse, they might sell your data to third parties. Here's what their privacy policy says: "Third parties might analyze our site data. In this case, however, we only give them non-identifiable information. This is to improve our site or marketing and only for internal use." This sketchy logging policy means that PrivateVPN isn't so private after all. I wish they were more transparent about their terms of service. Since PrivateVPN is located in Sweden, there are bound to be some legal limits on just how private they can actually be with user's information. In fact, the Swedish government has been tightening down on data retention laws in the country, hoping to make it mandatory for VPN providers to keep logs on users. According to Privacy News Online, Sweden wants to introduce VPN surveillance and mandate that their internet is built around optimising governmental surveillance. If you are experiencing problems with this company, you can file complaints with the Swedish Consumer Agency/KO, in English. Misleading advertising is against Swedish/EU Consumer Protection Laws. This guy's company details are publicly available via the D&B (Dun and Bradstreet) Business Directory - just type 'PrivateVPN Global AB' and the information will come up. According to other publicly accessible information, the director of this company is also part of the administration of *. You can google his name and the name of the company to look this information up. Also, file a complain about this "sole trader company" (as it only has 1 employee according to D&B) via the Econsumer site. This government site (Econsumer) is a consumer complaint database maintained by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission ("FTC"), a government consumer protection agency. Alternatively, you can sue them via the European Small Claims Procedure. UPDATE: Paypal claim decided in my favour.