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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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I find the "Mullvad VPN scratch cards" interesting. If a store near you has them you could buy one and be totally anonymous. What I find a bit odd is that you can buy them on amazon as well but sold directly by mullvad. Doesn't that defeat the purpose? The idea of the card is a decoupling of your real identity from the vpn user but when you buy the card in their store doesn't it negate that?
I am probably just missing something here. Does anyone have more insight?
The code on the card is covered so Amazon might know you use Mullvad but they have no way of knowing what your account is.
Mullvad know your acct but they have no way of knowing how it is you paid other than maybe it being a scratchcard which they don't track anyway.
All those things you listed simply confirm that a particular person bought a Mullvad scratch card. There's literally no way to associate that data with a particular Mullvad account. To do that they'd have to have a record of the card batch number and somehow have accessed the code underneath the scratch-off panel and then find a way to match those numbers against your Mullvad acct.
You're not wrong, BUT that's why Mullvad offers other forms of anonymous payment, the flexibility lets you be as paranoid as YOU want to be. You can pay in Bitcoin, or you can literally mail them an envelope of cash with no return address. Amazon scratch cards are just the most convenient option, and as always, you trade security for convenience.
I am not talking about amazon knowing it. Amazon offers shops for businesses, where a business directly sells goods to their customers using amazon as a transaction platform. Those shops send the goods directly to their customers (Sometimes it comes from an amazon warehouse as well tho). If the first case is true, mullvad would send me the card directly, so they would know I bought it, which makes the card obsolete in my view.
But maybe they don't send it themself and the cards are all just sitting in a big warehouse. Either way, to me it's not 100% a given that they couldn't at least in theory know who bought it.
I am just playing devils advocate here btw, I am not really concerned about it.
You are buying access to a VPN not a nuclear warhead for the black market. The link between buying a VPN card and the code used in that card to link to said vpn activity which is also pretty well protected on Mullvad is not easily discoverable. Seems like a pretty reasonable privacy gap to me.
If you're a Mullvad customer then they already know your IP and from that they could identify you pretty easily. But that's true of all VPN providers, but they claim they don't log and I seem to recall them saying they don't keep a record of scratch off card numbers (why would they?). Either way you have to trust them and based on the fact they're totally open I do.