A 24 year old Massachusetts man, Ryan Lin, has been brought up on numerous charges including online harassment and cyber stalking of another 24 year old woman who also resides in Massachusetts. During the course of the investigation, the FBI have discovered plenty of evidence to prove his guilt.
Various email and social media accounts of Lin’s have been seized by the FBI and the evidence is pretty overwhelming. Among the data within the accounts led authorities to conclude Lin had been using anonymity services including VPNs, also known as Virtual Private Networks, as well as Tor, an anonymous internet browser used mostly to reach sites on the Darknet, and other proxy services.
Lin also made the mistake of posting publicly about VPNs on his now shut down Twitter account. The original post was made by IPVanish, a VPN service, boasting about their policy for never recording logs of those using the service. Lin, in his arrogance, hopped onto the tweet with his reply claiming no-log VPN services simply don’t exist.
While there are plenty of VPN services that claim to keep zero logs of their users but are lying, there are, in fact, many services that provide just that. So, not only was Lin wrong in his claim, he stupidly chose to use a service, PureVPN, who just so happened to be one of the untruthful services.
PureVPN quickly handed over the logs of Lin’s activities to the FBI at their request, that in itself is proof of PureVPN not being as pure as they claim. Fortunately, thanks to all the data they handed over to the FBI it is safe to assume Ryan Lin will be convicted of his cyber crimes and one more cyber criminal will be swiftly brought to justice. In the meantime, we need to really consider who we’re entrusting with our information.