SURFSKIP IS ASS

TL;DR: Just don't use it. Catway lets you have it's paid features for free and also has extra features.

I want to address the truth about SurfSkip; which they have been hiding for several months. The below gives as much detail as I could gather about bad practices and illegal doings that SurfSkip does to make money.

1. The creators of SurfSkip are dirty criminals:

• They violated binary-person's intellectual rights

• They scammed over $2,000 from various open-source and hobbyist developers.[2]

• They have supposedly nuked Discord servers that compete against surfskip, which include TitaniumNetwork. [2]

• Heavily uses Deceptive Design to urge users to give them money, which are illegal in the EU and US[1]. Half of the buttons on the site redirect you to the "Plans" page, which asks you to pay for expensive plans in order to use the feature you wanted to use initially. (Specifically these dark patterns are used on surfskip.com: Forced action, Fake social proof[3], possibly Obstruction)

• Surfskip also boldly claims that they are "the leading" VPN on their redesigned VPN page, as well as that they are "highly creditable", which after digging for evidence, doesn't seem very true at all[3] (again, proof of Fake social proof). I also dislike that SurfSkip forces you to buy their overpriced premium/ultra plan in order to even download the VPN software (most likely Forced action , the close button is also hard to find).
  
  Additionally a VPN does not prevent you from any form of malware, again false advertisement

• SurfSkip regularly posts pirated movies on their Twitter page, allowing users who go onto their profile to watch the full movie for free illegally. Twitter has since taken down the pirated movies supposedly due to a DMCA, or a request to take the copyrighted material (in this case a full-length movie) down.
  
  

• According to TitaniumNetwork, one of their staff members has been scammed by SurfSkip. [2]

2. SurfSkip hides content away from their userbase

• On their twitter page, if you compare anything against SurfSkip, they will immediately block your account, and restrict you from seeing any of their posts, and if you even start to point out the bad things about SurfSkip on their Discord server, they will immediately ban you from their server and prevent you from interacting with them or people in the server ever again.

• If you go onto SurfSkip's website, and try and open up "Inspect Element" on your browser, you will be unable to view the site's code because they spam and excessively trigger the browser's debugging features and blocks code execution until you turn off the browser's debugging features. This is a really bad and corporate move that SurfSkip did. They explain that they do this to prevent "skids" from accessing the website's code; which I do not buy.

• SurfSkip is intentionally kept closed source only for the sake of making money; and apparently they refuse to be open source because the "expense of developers"... which to me doesn't make very much sense because you already do have developers working with/for SurfSkip. I honestly think being open source or atleast partially open source is a good thing because people on the internet can give suggestions about your site's code, report issues, and even make beneficial changes to your code (GitHub Pull requests).

3. SurfSkip promotes illegal websites

• I've noticed that on the movies, sports, and TV pages on the SurfSkip's website, pressing the "Watch" button on any of the forms of entertainment (movies, shows, sports, etc) SurfSkip provides; it redirects you to a pirated movie site to then watch illegally, they seem to be promoting and encouraging visiting illegal websites on the Internet. Where credit is due; they also list where to watch and pay legally.

4. Bad Practices

• After some digging; surfskip seems to have 2 central servers that most of their services operate on, which do not align with the many different proxy locations SurfSkip claims to have available. This most likely could be put under "false advertisement" by claiming that there are more regions and servers than the amount of servers that are actually available.
• SurfSkip claims to allow you to request your data that they have collected about you, however after inspection of the site, there is no clear way to request for your data. They also state that it may require a fee for your data, which I think is complete nonsense, the below is stated in the Privacy Policy:

  "The right to access – You have the right to request copies of your personal data. We may charge a small fee for this service." The opposite is also stated, but nowhere to be found is something to restrict SurfSkip from collecting data on you (*cough* *cough microsoft), this is stated in their Privacy Policy: "The right to restrict processing – You have the right to request that we restrict the processing of your personal data, under certain conditions."* The conditions are also not stated.

Footnotes

• [1]: According to deceptive.design:

  Businesses that use deceptive patterns are often caught up in legal cases and get hit with big fines and penalties.

Many types of deceptive pattern are already illegal in the EU and US, depending on the type and context of use.

• In the EU, the UCPD, GDPR, DSA and DMA help ensure a fairer internet for users
• In the USA, the FTC act, ROSCA, and CAN-SPAM are major federal laws that pack a punch

[3]: The "reviews" on their VPN page show a fake TrustPilot rating to show popularity, which is just an image.

(see: https://surfskip.com/vpn ) They (horribly) point out that this was a "early design stage" but it was thrown into production, but they neglected to do any of these:

or not even glue a fake trustpilot review image to your VPN banner, nowhere on the site does it show the trustpilot, you'll need to find it manually. Additional screenshot:

Other stuff:

• I honestly think that Cloudflare WARP is a really good (and free) alternative to SurfSkip's VPN service, as Cloudflare is highly trusted and creditable (they protect about 10% of the internet) and their services work really great.

  "Cloudflare provides security and performance to over 25 million Internet properties—and now this technology is available to the rest of us." — 1.1.1.1

• You can also use iEvade its bascically surfskip, but much faster and 100% free

Made by rare1k | Pulled from rare1k.dev | rare1k is not responsible for any domains using this. please contact me@psr.tf for that

Donate