[anti-abuse-wg] Fwd: Re: botnet controllers

Please allow me to comment on this on behalf of the VPN services 
affected by the accusations: 
https://www.ripe.net/participate/mail/forum/anti-abuse-wg/PDRhZGNmYmVmLTNmMmYtNjQ2ZC1iOTMzLWNhY2RkMDEyOGU0M0BzdG9yZXkub3ZoPg==

When you run a VPN service it simply lies in the nature of things that 
some miscreants buy accounts which lead to various types of complaints.

Our principle is not to serve the bad, but the good!

We checked all SBL listings in the past and found out that most of them 
were simply invalid.
Our removal requests were all ignored by Spamhaus, refusing any 
communication with us.
The problem with Spamhaus is that they can do whatever they want and 
nearly everyone follows them.
After starting legal actions in the UK against them based on their wrong 
accusations they moved their headquarters to Andorra, using the address 
of a hospital located there.
Earlier on a person we know very well tried the same in Switzerland and 
found out that they are not even registered there; they just rented some 
offices from Regus in Geneva.
Unlike other services such as BitNinja or Blocklist, Spamhaus has no 
real imprint on its website.
All those names such as Thomas Morrison, Pete Dawes or Vincent Hanna are 
fake identities.
Except a few insiders nobody knows who's behind that company, which 
claims to be nonprofit.

It is true that VPN services which don't log any user activities attract 
people with bad intentions and believe me: We are not happy about that 
either...but we have to live with that.
To us it seemed that it became a real passion of Mr. Steve Linford to 
destroy non-logging VPN providers; providers which are needed in 
countries like Iran or China to protect the freedom of speech (we have a 
lot of customers there).
More than 90 per cent of all VPN providers don't allow any Port 
Forwarding, but closing all Ports would be a kind of censorship in our 
opinion.
We do have our ToS which don't allow any misuse of our service, but we 
have no control over the actions of our users whatsoever.

I know that most of you won't be satisfied with that answer, but this is 
how we see things from our perspective.