Now I know that HMA is probably not the most secure VPN provider and have a history of giving up information to authorities, but I was just looking for a quick VPN (latency was a high priority) with a lot of servers in the US for me to use for online gaming.
I quickly learned on day one that HMA wouldn’t work for me and was somehow blocked for me by the Uni I’m currently at. That’s fine, it’s not their fault, I’ll just ask for a refund since they prominently feature a 30 day money back guarantee if you don’t like their service.
Oh and what a living hell it has been. They told me to send an email to support for a refund, I did that soon after purchasing as I realized my Uni was blocking me from connecting to it in the first place.
They promise a 12 hour response time at the latest and a day later… no response. I use their live chat widget (which only seems to appear at random times during the day and only for a brief period). I ask the representative, and only after they force the customer service reps to look at it do they respond to it.
But that’s not the end. They want to try to help me troubleshoot why it isn’t working before they give me a refund. Great. Another hoop I have to go through. Obviously since it was being blocked by my Uni, I wasn’t going to have much success. Ok, tried that.
Reply again afterwards, asking for them to issue a refund since the troubleshooting didn’t work. Didn’t receive a reply for a WEEK and would still not have received a reply were it not for the fact that I had to constantly scan the site for when they decided to make their chat widget available, and again contact customer support. The customer rep in chat assured me that someone would email me within an hour for a refund, and I still have yet to receive a message.
TLDR: Over a week later and with multiple emails, HMA blatantly ignores my requests for a refund even though they prominently advertise on their site that you can buy with piece of mind because of their easy money back guarantee. Don’t buy.
Lol trust me, HMA is horrible. When I was young and dumb I bought a VPN service from them. After a week of usage they asked for a scan of my ID card… I asked why, they said they have to keep it in their records… Soo much for them advertising anonymity… I was able to refund my money through Paypal though, so yay!
I know this has been asked a dozen trillion times, but what does everyone recommend besides HMA? I’ve been using Mullvad for a while now and have not had a bad experience yet, although I have no idea how vulnerable I may be using them.
TIL: It is good practice to run a trace to your VPN provider from the network you will be connecting from to verify IP connectivity before you fork out for a subscription.
PIA, Mullvad, literally anything else or even nothing. They’ve been caught working with the government and corporations. It’s basically saving the government the trouble of collecting it from your ISP or web services.
I like Mullvad because they take paper cash in the mail. I was not happy that they opened a US based VPN. I’m concerned that if the US server is compromised then the servers in Sweden could be compromised too.
They won’t address my concerns on this other than to say that if the US government is in my threat model then they aren’t the right service to use. Which is, I suppose, at least honest.
The threat of a dispute is often sufficient to get your money back, since each dispute is a black mark with their payment processor. Personally, I’d tell them they have 48 hours “or else.”
Their customer service is pretty impressive. The fact that I can do a live chat and get a direct answer to any kind of question I have is pretty awesome for me.
I don’t normally vouch for companies but for the price and service I get, I’ll put their name out there.
ok - thanks for the reply - can anyone vouch for this? I really just use PPTP to stream from the ipad to the apple tv. any reason to pay extra for the openVPN option other than having extra security? I’ll occasionally use it for BT, but I usually will run peerblock on top of using the VPN just in case my VPN gets disconnected.