What is Reddit's opinion of BTGuard?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

>I'm looking at both free and paid VPNs

Free VPNs are terrible and dodgy, NEVER use them. They normally keep logs, track what you do, have dns leaks etc etc etc.

As for paid VPNs, I recommend TorGuard but others such as PIA, NordVPN, ExpressVPN and BTGuard are also good.

TorGuard offers a completely no log service (means you can't get caught when downloading certain things), high end encryption, servers in over 50+ countries, shared services (makes it harder to track a single user), leak protection (something that free and some paid VPNs don't have), it's own DNS servers, kill switch (very important), and a 2 account system meaning that the VPN account can't be connect w/ a billing account.

They also add more servers and location upon the request of us customers. For £4/month it's the best imo.

Damn. I actually just tried to sign up for BTGuard and they wanted me to sign up for a paypal account... nope.

Edit: Either this wasn't there earlier or I had a mild stroke. Either way, paying WITHOUT signing up for a paypal account works for me now. I'm not going to dwell on why o_O

BTGuard is overpriced and performs poorly in high bandwidth situations. There are also far more issues with DNS leakage. Also, PIA is way more open and upfront with their business practices. At least, from my point of view.

> VPNs: [7] BTGuard (Canada), [8] ItsHidden (Africa), [9] Ipredator (Sweden), [10] (Cyprus / Netherlands)

Don't you think 9/10 of those are run by some intel agency or another?

They're fine for protecting yourself against the RIAA/MPAA (because none of the intel agencies care so much about movie piracy that they'd blow their cover).

But I think it's safe to assume every intel agency is interested in stuff people want to do "anonymously" - so it's safe to assume that many of those intel agencies run such VPNs.

Here is an article for you: In the article, the author lists a few anonymity service providers. I am using BTGuard's VPN Connection at the moment and it is very easy to setup and use. Most of these VPN Service providers have guides posted on their websites to walk you through setting up your VPN connection too. StrongVPN is another VPN service but I've never tried their service yet:

I live in China and I'll tell you that it doesn't work that way between super powers. China would never give up one of it's own. I may have to use a VPN to browse a free Internet but at least I have a "break any other country's law without possibility of consequence" card.

The only problem I've had is with asshole VPN providers that closed my accounts for DMCA complaints (all of which were American if course). I'm not looking at getting BTGuard which never logs, never gives up any information without a court order, and is based in Canada.

I have to return to the US before long though, but I think I'll keep using foreign VPNs for torrenting for my own safety when I return. You know, because the US legal system is broken and sucks.

I am using BTGuard. I know it sounds silly, but paying for anonymity is worth it to me. I was paying as much for NetFlix streaming so it was not a big deal.

I use Azureus and have set it to only transfer if the VPN is up. However, I am still worried if seeding is exposing me even with the VPN.

With how the technology works, you cannot. You have a few options.

PeerBlock / P2P Guardian - auto-blocks networks that your computer tries to connect to that are known to bust P2P traffic and users. It is at best 50% effective, as it doesn't hide anything from your ISP and if the lists it uses are out of date, you're boned. Better than nothing but it's like a pirate with a pissed off chimp for a leg - not much use.

Proxy/VPN - this is what ya need. Go to and check out their suggestions for VPN services but I like BTGuard. Works...alright and I'm fairly sure my problems I had were the ISP I had being very aggressive in finding P2P traffic. If you set your torrents max speeds low, it shouldn't cause any blips to show on their radars.

1. Avoid public trackers, especially TPB.
2. Since Demonoid is unfortunately offline for the foreseeable future, try to get an invite to another private tracker site. Using a private tracker significantly lowers the risk of getting warings/fines/sued.
3. If your friend feels he must use public trackers, or just wants another level of anonymity with the private ones, buy a subscription to an anonymous proxy service like BTGuard. Yes it costs money, but not a lot and it's probably the best step one can take to anonymizing their internet activity.

I like the idea of using BTGuard but honestly if you're going to spend $6 a month for a proxy you might as well spend an extra $4 and get a seedbox, they are equally safe and the're faster than downloading through your ISP plus there would be no worries of getting throttled.

No. The VPN provided by your university is linked to you. Any DMCA notices will be delivered to your university, who will then sanction you (in addition to ratting you out to the MPAA/RIAA). You're much better off using your normal ISP's connection. At least they can't make you take "intellectual property" classes as punishment.

Try BTGuard or something similar if you want VPN/proxy protection.

I would lean more towards VPN - a friend of mine recently got a DMCA notice using BTGuard, and as a result, another (more technical) friend discovered that most torrent clients don't proxy their UDP traffic properly. Since most trackers are now UDP trackers (most notably TPB), that means even using the BTGuard socks proxy, your IP address is still getting out there.

You're certainly not the first

/r/torrents/comments/25r5fm/just_got_a_copyright_notice_from_isp_even_though/

Either BTGuard is in fact logging your data (unlikely? I dunno). Or, more likely, using a SOCKS proxy w/ torrents is a bad idea. Offhand I'd suggest sticking to VPN when torrenting. Not sure on the details but your real IP address may be leaking if you're using just a proxy.

I used BTGuard for a while (laid off, stopped paying for it to save extra cash and I just haven't gotten around to resubscribing yet), it wasn't free but it was only $50/year so basically pocket change on a month to month basis. I'd recommend it.

I did some research before I got BTGuard and didn't have much luck finding any free ones that were highly recommended. So I just bit the bullet and paid for the one that's the most highly recommended I could find.

Using BTGuard is not in any way illegal though... So what can they actually prove? That I'm trying to hide something? That's fine... Privacy is not illegal. They can't however tie my ip address to a specific download, so I don't really understand where you're coming from.

I don't recommend BTGuard.. they are known for being slow, unstable, overpriced and having little to no support

I suggest you try PIA instead.. 100,000+ users and the most widely used VPN for P2P :)

Do not use BTGuard. They have terrible downtimes and a Proxy server can store your requests.

Read this:

And always pay with bitcoin.

If you are in the residence halls don't do it. All traffic is monitored by IT and you will be caught. VPNs won't work because you are already part of one.

A vpn like BTGuard might work on university wireless, but it's too slow to really do any good.

If the university gets any notices from rights holders they have no qualms handing your name over to them so they don't get sued.

I've tried BTGuard, VPN Unlimited, and Private Internet Access (PIA). My recommendation is PIA due to speed, privacy, and cost. Found a good deal on lifetime subscription a couple months ago. No noticeable difference between the speed on this service vs. my ISP speed (definitely not true for the other services I tried).

We've gotten like 4 letters from our ISP about it, including one from Warner asking us to pay $20 for Argo. We rip them all up. They were all regarding torrents from before we started using BTGuard.

When it comes to VPNs my major concern is: Can people that work at, let's say, BTGuard look at the contents of my internet traffic. For example I would feel better knowing that there was no possible way that a BTGuard employee could look at my banking traffic. I know that an SSL connection fixes this, but what about other connections that aren't encrypted? Does BTGuard's AES encryption take care of this? I'm not sure at what point in the pipeline that the AES encryption actually happens.

dickthespic is not uploading anything. Look at the upload dates on this stuff. Everything is dated from before, right down to the comments.

It looks like browsing is organized in reverse order by date, but no way to flip it, and if you move forward enough to the present you eventually get blank pages. So it doesn't look like anything new is up.

Also, historically, whenever Demonoid has gone down, the forums always seemed to be the first thing back up. This site is quite fishy since there's no forums.

EDIT: Downloading torrents anonymously still produces a referral link to BTGuard. Something I would imagine would be removed if it wasn't actually Demonoid.

Not really, unfortunately.

The only other thing I've personally used is BTGuard but that will probably be under heavy scrutiny with Canada's newest pro-spying law in place. I need to go read specifics I that.

That said, any encrypted traffic leaving the country is DEFINITELY captured, so even if it's a VPN service on the moon, traffic will be stored somewhere, even if it's not cracked (yet) or the CIA hasn't stolen the private key from a foreign company's system.

Unless Rand can get his way, maybe.

You cannot torrent a VPN service, the free services can't be trusted because you don't know what they're doing with your data since they don't make money off subscriptions. Pay VPN's are the only way to go and TorrentFreak surveys which are safest, which don't respond to US gov. subpoenas and takedown notices, etc.

I've been using BTGuard for years now, not a single notice or problem after almost exclusively using it to torrent.

After doing some research, Canadians and everyone else should not use BTGuard. There are plenty of VPN alternatives that are faster, have better customer service and are less expensive. Check out /r/vpn for more info.

If you're worried about anonymity when using bit torrent try a VPN service. I'm using BTGuard, it costs a few $$ per month but is a good value imho.

Torrent Freak -- VPN Services That Take Your Anonymity Seriously, 2013 Edition

response from Torrent freak

Hi

Thanks for your email and the information on BTGuard.

The article we wrote doesn't try to assess anything else other than the anonymity offered by any of the providers from a logging standpoint and inclusion on the list is not necessarily an endorsement from us.

That said, we'll seek a comment from BTGuard on the issue but it's probably best if you also take this up directly with them since you're the customer in this instance and the guy handing over money.

Again, thanks for the contact

Cheers!

Maybe because showing geographic data would be counter-intuitive to running a VPN? That's why it was intentionally cropped out. I'm not trying to make any scientific claims here, just saying why I like PIA. BTGuard was utter bullshit in regards to speed, so this is a nice change of pace.

How exactly does a VPN work, in regards to upload/download speeds?

If I subscribed to BTGuard, would my speeds be bottlenecked by how fast they can upload/download?

The website says "unlimited speed" but.. there has to be a limit..

It's an awesome client, but it doesn't support SOCKS5 proxies, the protocol used by a service like BTGuard, which is practically a necessity these days unless you're in a "choice" country (and if you are, I'm jealous). Of course, it'll still work with a full VPN - I personally believe everyone should be using that instead of a proxy, but that's a rant for another time - but even in that case, I tend to gravitate towards µTorrent just because it's used more.

I don't give a shit if someone knows I'm torrenting... I care if they can prove it. So, in actuality, BTGuard DOES ACCOMPLISH WHAT I'M TRYING TO DO. lol

EDIT: Another great thing about this service is that it allows you to obfuscate your activities from your ISP so that they don't throttle your downloads.

BTGuard works great until you try to cancel. Earlier this year I wanted to upgrade from their torrent proxy to their full VPN, and found there's no way to do that on their website.

Instead you're instructed to email them that you want to cancel one service, and they'll manually cancel it. Then you sign up for the other.

However, they completely ignored my emails for weeks, no response at all. Finally I had my credit card block the recurring charge, that was the only way I could unsubscribe. Needless to say, didn't upgrade to their VPN after that experience.

That is going to be a very broad list. Literally any torrent friendly VPN will work with Deluge.

So.. AirVPN, BTGuard, , Mullvad, Private Internet Access, etc.

For further research see and

Can't say I've had those issues with PIA.

> I've gone to BTGuard, which only VPNs my torrent client.

Whoever you're quoting doesn't know the difference between a VPN and a proxy.. they are describing using a proxy. I'd suggest staying away from proxies, then you have to hope that your torrent client will know to kill switch itself if the proxy connection drops.

Content owners send those letters, not the ISP. They join a popular torrent of a movie/TV/song/etc. then record the IP addresses of whoever joins. They use the IP address to determine your ISP, and send a letter to them saying they found you torrenting their media. The ISP just forwards this letter to you.

The only way to truly prevent this is by using a VPN/proxy service like PIA or BTGuard, which masks your IP address by routing your BT traffic through a foreign server.

I'm not sure, but this looks like an overly expensive VPN of some sort (like BTGuard) :/

I recommend PIA instead ($3 USD/month, 100,000+ users, no logs and widely used for P2P)

There's a list of VPN providers here:

For example, BTGuard allows connections to port 80 (which is web traffic, so no blocking), so if you were to connect to that all your traffic would go through that tunnel. (including gaming)

You'll have to see which one is closest to where you live and how they perform for you, but with a decent VPN and connection the added latency shouldn't be all that much.

has servers in many different countries as well. They also support port 443 which should be fine too.

For reference, Port 80 = HTTP (web traffic) and port 443 = HTTPS. Firewalls normally don't block them because otherwise you wouldn't be able to browse the web.

Good luck, let me know if you need more help!

I've been using BTGuard's bittorrent proxy for years now without any problems. Please note that BTGuard offers 2 products: bittorent proxy for $6.95 and a proper VPN proxy for $9.95. If you're only going to use it for torrenting then all you'll need is the $6.95 option.

I haven't used any other VPN services though, so I can't really compare.

WARNING. BTGuard may not be as secure as you think!! Use at your own risk.

1. They do not respond to emails from potential clients with technical questions.

2. They keep vital equipment in a highly suspect location.

I would go as far as to suggest it could be a honeypot. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should anyone make the mistake of believing that Canada and the Canadian government are doing anything less then 100% collusion with Americans on domestic surveillance. You've been warned!

BTGuard is shit. I couldnt get their vpn to work with the built in windows 8 software and had to resort to their OpenVPN software and that was slow as shit. I get 100 megabits normally and with their VPN i got < 1 megabit. I filed a support ticket to help me and they closed it without replying. Then they canceled my account 4 days after I payed with Paypal, so I opened up a dispute on Paypal and they resolved it in my favor and I am waiting to get my money back.

TL;DR

BTGuard is shit. Dont get it.

Just signed up for BTGuard the other day. $5 a month for the peace of mind of knowing that I can download anything I want for as long as I want without any chance of being caught? Yeah, I'd say it's worth it. It seemlessly interdigitates with utorrent and even comes with a piece of encryption software so that your ISP doesn't even know what you're doing. It's awesome.

Apathy.

If he is torrenting, consider getting him a setup on usenet. You could also check out BTGuard or IPREADATOR, these seem the most popular (I've tried neither of these).

Also, this.

I use PeerBlock but it does not really maintain anonymity. It just blocks peers it considers as part of a group who should not see what you share.

I invest in btguard, which is a VPN and does maintain anonymity. BTGuard is protected by Canadian privacy laws, so it is not easy for a judge to order them to hand over your identity to a suing entity. I would not say it can never happen though.

Hope this helps and sorry if I mis-read your question entirely.

I installed 4.0.0 today and afterward reviewed the Execution Log and saw that my home IP address is showing as the External IP Address. I looked up the bugs on their Github page and saw that a couple of other people have reported the same thing.

If you use a Proxy like BTGuard, DON'T install 4.0.0. Wait until this bug has been fixed.

Now if I can only find an earlier version to install...

Edit: Found it:

Don't pirate without a vpn guys, come on.

I recommend AirVPN for VPN services.

If you don't want a vpn, use a proxy that routes your torrent program through secure channels.

I recommend BTGuard for proxy purposes.

If using, or setting these things up are too much for you technically, ask a friend. If you have no tech savvy friends, you really should not be torrenting because you're asking to get caught up in a lawsuit.

Google "anonymous vpn services"

I use one called BTGuard and it's worked for me. Just so nobody thinks I'm a shill I am in no way promoting them. There are a buttload out there and they all do virtually the same thing.

I used to get letters from my provider fairly often until I thought I was going to get dropped. Got a VPN and haven't heard a word since in 3 years. Obviously this is entirely anecdotal but there are so many legitimate uses for VPNs it's be pretty hard for them to use that as "evidence"

I use BTGuard VPN based out of Canada. According to them they keep absolutely no logs and the speeds aren't too bad and the added latency is pretty minimal (although I am located relatively close geographically to their data center). I also use VPN Check which is a little free program that monitors your IP address and cuts all traffic and terminates pre-determined programs (my torrent client) if it detects any changes. Using this method I've never had any problems and it is easy and feels secure enough for my purposes and is pretty stress free with VPN check.

Nothing at all, except the contract/agreement under which they are to withdraw an amount as payment for a service. Any unauthorized withdrawal outside of this would probably be considered theft if it is on purpose (ie not mistake ie not corrected). So you also have the law on your side. And if it is a reputable (reputable = reputation) company they will value their company higher than the theft amount. If they was to steal from their customers they would lose a lot more money (probably). If they could get away with it, who knows. This mutual interest is what keeps the balance. Trust is an illusion - believe only in mutual self interest. But dont give them incentive, a pretty large company, BTGuard VPN, scammed me for $1200 because i let them hold my payouts for too many months and the profit for them to scam me was bigger than the profit of maintaining their reputation, if the incentive was smaller it would not be enough incentive - their reputation would matter more.

If you get the right VPN you should notice only a small difference in speed. Actually if you get a specific VPN for torrents like BTGuard for torrents you will find your throughput improved and less likely to impact the speed of the rest of your activities.

But again a general purpose VPN should slow you down less than 10%.

A friend told me this. Pirating TV and movies is wrong.

Late to this discussion, and almost certainly the least informed, but I started getting a few DMCA notices and I went to BTGuard. Many of my torrents wouldn't even connect through that proxy, so I'd disable it occasionally and then I'd get more DMCA notices.

I got a VPN instead. No fuss, no muss, no DMCA notices. Except when I reboot and forget to turn the VPN back on.

However, one of my email accounts' smtp server doesn't work through the VPN. Minor pain.

I didn't have such a good experience with BTGuard. Poor speeds/downtime, that kind of thing. This was a while back though, so they might've improved.

I've been using tunnelr for about two years. Their support is excellent, and there's a fair few nodes to choose from depending on where you happen to be.

I found that when i used BTGuard I had to restart my uTorrent every now and then when I noticed nothing was moving. I recently switched to PrivateInternetAccess and everything seems a lot smoother. Canceling BTGuard for me was simply canceling the PayPal sub.

I just purchased BTGuard a month ago. The service does not work at all. The servers are unreachable, and the customer service is non existent. I would definitely go with private Internet access. It hides your ip from a list of available locations and also comes with a VPN.

That you have an encrypted link with BTGuard's IP address. That's it. Of course, if you are seeding something besides Linux ISOs, you might want to check how commited BTGuard is to user privacy. For example, logs can't be subpoenaed if they are never collected in the first place.

Pedantic details: BTGuard's VPN is of the PPTP type. PPTP has weaknesses in authentication. SSL or IPSec is where strong security is. However, your ISP and even copyright trolls have better things to do than to crack encryption.

>Last thing. Don't know why, but my download speeds are super fast on BTGuard compared to running naked.

they claim using btguard bypasses isp throttling of torrents

Only download from trusted sources, eg Pink and Green uploaders on pirate bay, or private trackers like demonoid. Failing that, use one of the many free services (eg. BTGuard) to hide your download. It doesn't prevent your ISP from knowing you downloaded a certain size file, but it does prevent them from being able to identify its contents. At that point they would have to individually backward engineer your online activity, and subpoena the free service, to determine the file contents... a step likely to be blocked by the service provider, and adds further cost to their investigations. They simply can't do that for each instance... it would bankrupt them in under a month. They're mainly after those that download and then sell to the masses.

On their phones, mostly. Reddit is usually blocked on the school computers due to the porn half but it's not hard to beat that, seeing as there are so many online proxies or just a mobile installation of BTGuard or something on your flash drive.

Tor devs already said not to use torrents over Tor for a variety of reasons

If you dont want to pay for security, then there are no good options. Those silly BTGuard and IP block lists dont work.

If you are really worried, again you will have to pay for security. Usenet, VPN, or a Seedbox.

Wow. How can your anonymity be secured if your account is easily hackable. All it would take is for the BTGuard user database to be compromised for hackers to have total access to all users' accounts.

In this day and age there is no excuse for storing passwords in plaintext, ever. It is a solved problem, and any web developers not aware of this aren't doing their professional duty of keeping up with their field.

Thanks the sleuthing and the update, I've removed the Torrentfreak article from the sidebar for now. Please do post an update if there are any.

Also consider posting this and your screenshot to . There does not appear to be a record for BTGuard yet.

From BTGuard's website: "With Bittorent, everyone knows who you are and what your downloading."

It's amazing how much a simple spelling mistake can, accurately or not, make someone seem completely untrustworthy.

Site's servers are in the US now.

IP is 192.73.233.233

Forums aren't up, which usually they are with Demonoid (usually up before the actual site).

It appears to be using public trackers.

The download torrent anonymously links are referrals to BTGuard (something if it was fake, I would imagine would have been changed/removed).

There's now information for contacting them regarding DMCA takedowns. I don't recall this ever being on the original Demonoid.

EDIT: According to the host's terms of service, they don't allow any sites that violate US law (no surprise there though).

I use BTGuard and my IP shows as coming from the Netherlands. If the content owner wants to go to a US court and begin an international case they're welcome to. (Only to finally get to BTGuard who will say 'we don't keep logs'.)

Are you using the BT Proxy, or the BT VPN?
I use the BT Proxy for torrents, and I use Giganews for other major downloads.
But I'm curious to how good the BTGuard VPN service is, and if it's worth it if I'm on FIOS (Verizon).

I use BTGuard and I think it's great! There was a great post yesterday that broke it down nicely that BTGuard does NOT store any of your data (ie: IP, etc) and if a 3rd party were to ask for costumer information (ie: court order) they wouldn't have any data to hand over to begin with. For $10 it's worth it.

> Btguard works the same as peer guardian, if I remember correctly. It basically blocks ips that are logged on a list somewhere.

No, BTGuard is a proxy server, so all your traffic goes to BTGuard encrypted (like a VPN of sorts), and BTGuard distributes it to peers from there. It's much safer than an IP blacklist, since traffic can only be traced up to BTGuard's IPs, and they explicitly don't keep logs.

full disclosure: I don't own any of these services Giganews is a pretty "reputable" provider. They are a bit expensive but definitely offer the best service (PS you can get the VPN only w/o usenet it's cheaper). However their point of exists are in the US and Netherlands... not exactly the two bests spots at this time. But this might change with time. IPREDator seems ok, however they only use PPTP which is easily defeated. Also I don't think they allow port forwarding like Vypr. There's also Mullvad, but they used a modified OpenVPN client which I don't like much (it's not like I have to reaview all that code). Of course I would fail miserably if I didn't mention BTGuard. Sadly it being canadian makes it a little bit pointless. They aren't the cheapest offering around.

BTGuard seems like some generic VPN service, and IMO looks extremely shady. Use one of the VPNs recommended by privacytoolsio instead. If you want to be more anonymous, ditch VPNs and use Tribler or I2P.

First off, BTGuard is not a VPN, it's basically a proxy for your torrent client. It doesn't remotely offer the same level of security and privacy that a good VPN does.

I can't say I've experienced crashing from PIA. What platform was this on? I've been running daily for years on OSX, iOS, and Linux with no crashes to speak of. The only issue I had was that it would sometimes refuse to launch on OSX for a few months (without killing the process and restarting it). But that was fixed.

I just did some research. Apparently if you are using the BTGuard proxy it's still good, but if you are using the VPN exclusively for your torrenting, there are some concerns of what happens during a disconnect from a server.

BTGuard reiterated last month that they keep no logs saying "we do not log our customers’ usage or IPs and never will", but that they may have to shut down their Canada servers due to the new laws in Canada.

But basically, just use the proxy and it's not a problem.

Probably absolute worse case these days in the US: your ISP will send you a series of notices for consecutive violations they detect, until at some point (6?) they will cut off your service.

There may still be active prosecution going on, but AFAIK this is the lower-cost, easier way they're taking to fight online content sharing.

For about $6/month you can get a VPN or BTGuard (which is a VPN just for your torrent client), and then the ISP can't see your content - but it doesn't sound like you really need that.

You won't be questioned because all the data traffic will be going through your VPN company, and if anything happens, the internet company (or the authorities, not sure which one) will ask the VPN company to hand over your data, and it depends on the company you are with. For example if you are with BTGuard, they don't log your data usage so if the internet company/authorities asks for your data to BTGuard, they will say sorry we don't keep logs so they are out of luck.

1. Any free VPN isn't worth using. You won't get the security or the speed of a paid one. I use BTGuard.

2. If you use a VPN you should be fine. Even with public trackers like TPB.

3. I would urge you to take precautions but it's your risk to take.

Am I missing something? Been using BTGuard for some time now with no problems, just recently, last night and today I've noticed when I try to connect to which should be based in Amsterdam, all IP leak type sites I try are showing me connected to the American Department of Defence network centre in Columbus Ohio. Fishy no?

just don't use a VPN provider based in Canada like BTGuard.
using a VPN provider with a virtual outlet in Canada is still safe,
based on information i got from ibvpn which has p2p outlets in Toronto.
personally i don't use those outlets, but they remain available to me.

i would avoid VPN providers based in all 5 eyes countries,
and now all 14 TPP members (stricter piracy legislation pending),
as well as UK and all current EURO currency using countries.
EU applicant and non EURO countries are still safe for now.
some EU/EURO countries have local laws protecting p*riv*acy,
but i would not count on them for international piracy issues.

> BTGuard

There are much cheaper (and more robust) options available. PIA is about half the cost, great speeds, lots of options for out-of-country connections. Definitely recommend.

I would strongly advise against using BTGuard. I was somehow signed up for duplicate monthly billing and they billed me twice per month until I noticed it. When I contacted their customer service, they were extremely rude and refused to refund the money.

I have also read about their routing methods allowing for your ISP's IP address to leak and be exposed. They are not safe or trustworthy.

I have to ask a noob question since I've never used VPNs before (since I only used BTGuard as a proxy). I've registered and activated, and an IP trace changes my IP address and puts me in Chicago, safely away from my actual residence.

Does this mean I'm protected? Is there anything else I have to worry about?

I don't recommend BTGuard.. overpriced, known for being slow, unreliable and having next to zero support :/

I recommend you use PIA.. $3 USD/month, 100,000+ users, no logs and widely used for P2P

Make sure to enable the VPN kill switch, DNS leak protection and check your IP >

Damn. Thanks for the tip. I am really bad about checking my credit card bill, so if they did that to me, I wouldn't notice it. I'll check my bill, and, now that I'm using the other VPN, I'll just cancel BTGuard.

FTP = File Transfer Protocol

SFTP = Secure File Transfer Protocol

The secure part encrypts the information when sending/receiving files. The other doesn't.

Get yourself a proxy service and you should be golden. I use BTGuard but a bunch of people have had problems with it. I haven't so far in terms of download speeds. It does have a problem with getting trackers but that could be because of the proxy itself since some don't work behind one. I have a proxy service and so far, no e-mails from cuntcast about what I am doing. Good luck!

Sure. Basically it cycles my BitTorrent traffic through other countries like Germany and Canada while leaving my other internet traffic alone. My downloads therefore look like they're coming from somebody else in Verizon's eyes. The name of my VPN was BTGuard, but there are tons of VPN companies that all do the same thing. I did like BTGuard though because it's less expensive and it has instructions on the website on how to configure popular BitTorrent clients to work with it. Enjoy!

Holy leak everyone, just when I thought I had provided my last update, comes a WTF discovery I must share.

When I emailed BTGuard, I received an automated reply. They confirmed receipt of my email, opened a service ticket with a serial number and advised a reply would be forthcoming.

The WTF moment came when I noticed that they had also copied their reply to the email address I ONLY use to log into PayPal.

Now when I opened an account with PayPal a few years ago they required an email address created through my ISP. No gmail, hotmail, etc. It had to be: .

It's to verify your identity to them to reduce the possibility of fraud. Quite understandable and acceptable.

Since I use it only to log into PayPal, either PayPal or my ISP leaked this info. Quite simply under no ordinary circumstances should BTGuard have this information.

If and when they reply to this issue I will again update. Until then, please guide yourself accordingly...

Second update: A recent visit to Torrent Freak after I published my emails to them here, discloses that the stickied article writing about BtGuard and UK has been taken down. This article was about BTGuard's recent & dramatic increase in UK subscribers.

My guarded optimism is gone!

Torrent Freak's reply to me only suggested a possible reason for their off line status. Torrent Freak's previously admitted close relationship with BTGuard and their recent inquiries should have resulted in more than a suggestion.

From the many Vpn services only a few are the real deal. Real deal for me: NO LOGS what so ever. No ip log, no logging how long your session is, etc. So there is no identifying the costumer. Not even via the payment (bitcoin) If they say something like: * no illegal purposes, they log * no logging unless court order.. * any reason what u can't do: they log.

I like the price and features of PIA, but why oh why are the USA based!? I will never trust an USA based company when it comes to privacy/security. I use BTGuard.. Canada based, signed up with mailinator email and payed in bitcoin. They say they don't log and in case of court order, they have to hand over an empty harddrive, with nothing but the OS software. I hope they mean what they say.

Okay. Sounds good. I will have to do more research into private trackers because I don't have a lot of experience with them. As soon as this month's subscription to BTGuard is up I will make the switch. Thanks again!

I've never used their VPN, but I disagree that their Biittorrent proxy service is junk. I never have to worry about my VPN going out and exposing my connections because Qbittorrent is set up for all connections to go through BTGuard's proxy server.

It's totally worth it.

A VPN is what you want. With a VPN your connection goes to the VPN server then out to the general internet. What's shown to all the sites you go to is the IP of the VPN server.

I use BTGuard and like it. The downside of a VPN is it can slow things down, you're limited to the bandwidth available from the VPN. So getting a good VPN service is critical.

For just occasional use you could use TOR. It bounces your connection through multiple locations before going to the general internet. It is slow though. They have a browser bundle that's dead simple to use. You can even put it on a usb and not have to install it on the PC you're using.

Buy a proxy - cheaper then a VPN or seedbox,

Would recommend BTGuard - simple and easy to use - and they don't keep records.

just to note : BTguard sells both proxy and vpn - so still your choice

There's always a never ending debate between Private Internet and BTGuard, I know they essentially do the same exact thing and probably at similar speeds, but have you ever noted what your highest speed with PIA was?

eu does session logging not activity logging, and retention is usually just one week - big fucking deal - it would take months for any authority to gain access to logs, and by then the subject of their investigation would already have been deleted. i agree that PIA and BTGuard should scare the shit out of anyone trying to avoid North America's subservience to NSA/Darpa spies, no matter how much those providers profess to the contrary.

Hey there. I'm a bit late to this thread but wanted to ask.

There's some recent popularity to VPNs like BTGuard/TorGuard and the like for better or for worse. I recall that when I logged on through one a few months ago, I was banned for exploitation.

When I spoke to a representative, the answer they gave me was that I was just to never use a VPN while playing WoW because currency sellers were frequent users of them. Is this the actual answer? Is there a means to specify that I use a VPN while logging on to WoW or should I just never do so?

I've downloaded roughly 200-300GB (including a few incidences where I downloaded 60GB/uploaded 20GB in a 24h period) over the last two months using BTGuard. That's at college in a dorm and at my letters yet, and the speeds are great. At the college, I've gotten 1.5MB/s or higher. It's only $10 a month too - less if you buy in bulk.

Assuming you mean legally torrenting, of course!

>tracking up load bandwidth

That's a common lie a lot of universities spread around. It's actually based on packet sniffing.

If you really want to be protected, use BTGuard, and if they say something about your bandwidth, say you've been using netflix.

From my experience and research, I'd say PrivateInternetAccess, and you're good to go. For Linux there's special instructions.

I agree BTGuard under performs in speed from what they claim. In order to cancel you have to log into your PAYPAL and cancel the subscription that is set up. They don't mention this on their site, but it is hidden in their tech support FAQ so I paid an extra month sadly...

It's a proxy. That means, they stand in for you as a middle man, and they deliberately don't keep logs. It's simple, its cheap, and it works.

I got a series of nasty, lengthy notices from my ISP over the course of a few weeks. I wasn't so much concerned about being sued as getting throttled due to strikes, so I got BTGuard. Haven't heard a peep out of my ISP since.

I use BTGuard.

Essential reading if you're considering a VPN. Some of them will hand your data over as quickly as an ISP.

I don't understand downvotes either. It's like a secret club sometimes. I genuinely wanted to know some answers. I'm not being facetious or anything, I just wanted things explained properly. I mean, I get that it's anonymous going to the internet, but until Oh-blivious pointed out the encryption to me (I forgot about encryption), I didn't realize that there was a way to truly anonymize your data.

I'm just weighing my decision on this sort of thing. I'd also love to know if I could "queue up" several downloads to one of these servers and wait until I can get to a faster internet connection to grab them at a later date. My internet is too slow and too limited to get what I want most of the time, and that includes Steam. I get maybe four times in a month where I have access to fast internet. I still think a torrent proxy like the one BTGuard offers would be pretty useful in that case, for the price of $7, but being able to temporarily store things would be a nice bonus too.

Besides getting a seedbox, I also recommend switching entirely to Private Torrent Trackers

Also.. PIA is cheaper and more vetted than BTGuard

Using Publicly Tracked Torrents?

(The Pirate Bay, Kat, EZTV, Torrentz, etc)

You are at risk for targeting by Copyright Trolls!

Receving DMCA/Infringment Letters/etc can lead to serious consequences!

Using P2P at your University?

(Private Trackers or Publicly Tracked Torrents)

Nearly all Universities ban P2P and have serious consequences for committing piracy while using their networks!

Breaking your Univerisities TOS can lead to reprimand and possibly expulsion!

• Follow these Steps to avoid Copyright Trolls/DMCA/Infringment Letters/Bans on P2P/etc

Has anyone been sued/arrested who also used BTGuard? Or has any BTGuard employees leaked that BTGuard was coerced into collecting user's data? Occam's Razor would suggest maybe they just suck at responding to emails.