A VPN service that spent 12 years promising it kept no logs handed police a database naming over 500 of its users.
That service is First VPN Service (1VPNS)Â and on July 13, 2026 the US Treasury sanctioned it for renting servers to ransomware gangs that hit American hospitals, businesses, and local governments.
Every VPN sales page on the internet carries the same pledge this one did. Only this service got cracked open in public.
The No-Logs Promise That Wasn’t
Police reached the servers before the sanctions did. In May 2026, French and Dutch authorities dismantled the network alongside Europol, investigators from 16 countries, and the FBI’s Boston Field Office, seizing 33 servers across 27 countries.
Investigators quietly got inside the setup before the takedown and walked away with the user database. Details on 506 subscribers went to police overseas, and the haul produced 83 intelligence packages now feeding open cases.
We’ve said for years that such a claim is worth exactly as much as the company behind it, and here’s the receipt. The promise was marketing copy. The database was real.
Why the US Sanctioned 1VPNS
The Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the company, its administrator Dmytro Rashevskyi, and Belarusian national Yegeniy Vladimirovich Silayev, who sold “cryptors” that disguise ransomware as harmless files.
Since 2014, 1VPNS advertised on cybercriminal forums, offering no records of user activity and a flat refusal to help police. Ransomware crews bought in to hide their attacks and manage stolen data, costing US victims billions. We checked all three of its domains: 1vpns.com, 1vpns.net, and 1vpns.org are dead.
Hide Your Digital Fingerprint
What This Means for Your VPN
None of this should scare you off a VPN. The U.S. Treasury said plainly that these tools have real privacy uses, and this action targeted a service built for criminals.
Stick with a VPN that has been vetted over and over by credible auditors outside the company. Surfshark, IPVanish, NordVPN, and ExpressVPN have all put their no-logs claims in front of independent auditors, which is the part 1VPNS never did. Our VPN rankings show how each one scores.
The cheap end is where people get burned, from seized free VPN servers that were unencrypted to a free provider that leaked user data.
Final Thoughts from Troy
A company that swore it logged nothing produced 506 names the moment police asked. That is the entire lesson, and it cost those users nothing to learn.
You can’t audit a VPN yourself, so if a provider won’t point you to a published audit by a firm that doesn’t work for them, its privacy policy is just a sales page.
For more details on this story, refer to the article from BleepingComputer and the official press release from the Treasury Department.
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