So back in summer of 2020 during the COVID shutdowns and remote work from home I signed up to some udemy courses and taught myself a little bit of Unreal Engine in order to be able to create a computer PC game of my own using Unreal Engine with the intent of later uploading it to the Steam gaming platform...
As a beginner to UE gaming engine there were some issues that I couldn't easily resolve on my own so I contacted a guy by the name of LITRUV as he had a website that was offering a live session by the hour 'real time' remote Unreal Engine help/tutorial service... So I set up a couple hours with him and our first session went well enough until he realized that my game was essential a 3D simulator of a Chinese nuke (specifically the DF-41) and then he started laughing and making jokes of the fact that I choose a Chinese nuke to make a game around...
Since I had prepaid him for several hours, after our first sessions I promptly confirmed and scheduled with him the second session. As he is from Australia and our sessions were "live", we had to agree ahead of time on date/time that worked for the both of us (I was Central Time Zone in the USA) and so we agreed on the next time slot and I thought all was well... Come time for the second session (which I already prepaid) this LITRUV guy doesn't join the session even though from his ID (we had previously exchanged ParSec, TeamViewer, and Discord/Twitch account info) it was clear to me he was actively online at the time... so he totally ignores me and blows past the entire hour, then at the end of the hour he has the audacity to turn around and accuse me of being a "no-show" and thereby stating that I had forfeited the rest of my credits because he perceived that I gave him "attitude" etc etc etc...
During our first session, before he started acting racists and exposed his anti-Chinese sentiments, I had asked him what hosting platform he used when he showed me his new site (website that he put out his Unreal Engine gaming help service etc) that he created in which he answered that he preferred to host on VULTR rather than the likes of Rackspace, AWS, GCP or Azure and he said this was because VULTR was a Australian company and that it was smaller and had more of a family feel to it, stating that he personally knew several fellow sysadmin/etc friends that worked at VULTR....
Based on this I had decided to give VULTR a try and signed up for an account. I liked that VULTR seemed to have lower prices than Azure or AWS and that it had option to spin up VM servers in a diverse geographically region... At the time I was also with some online Steam friends who were physically located in China and were interested in helping me work on my DF-41 Unreal Engine project/game... but since the likes of Dropbox were banned in China and Microsoft cloud services and Google Drive/Store servers were either slow or nonfunctional, I needed to use the VULTR server to spin up a server in their Singapore region which at the time was neither throttled nor censored from the US side nor the Chinese side...
This was again the summer of 2021 and one of the heights of US-China tensions with Trump threatening to ban WeChat/TikTok/DJI and basically all things Chinese so since my Unreal Engine project files were quite large I needed to find a neutral intermediary to exchange game development files with folks in China who were willing to take a look and offer help with my project/game....
I had previously told this LITRUV guy that I would be checking out the VULTR that he promoted and told me about and after LITRUV turned full racists and went gloves off, I knew I wouldn't be getting my money back for the unused credits so I told him I was going to write a report on him and expose his unethical tactics publicly online... He then told me he was going to get his friend at VULTR to basically get back at me for it, and I shrugged it off at the time but some days later I got what at first appeared to be an automated email from VULTR stating that "Additional Verification Needed" and that "Due to recent activity on your account, our billing department requests additional information to verify your account."
Less than a day later after I received that email, even before I had time to act on it, I received a second follow up email stating that if I did not respond within 24 hours that my account would be terminated... So I immediately responded with the required info, which was clearly listed as needing "A photo of your government ID (showing a name and photo only)" and also "A partial photo of your Credit Card (showing the last four numbers & name only)."
I didn't even bother to redact out anything and just sent the full photo of my government ID and also my credit card that was on file with them. (I had pre-paid and was not behind on any payments etc)
Figuring that was the end of it, I forgot about this incident until the very next day I'm surprised and shocked to receive yet another email, this time demanding new requirements (after I had already successfully submitted the information that was initially requested) and asking that I now provide "A photo of you holding the recently uploaded ID (next to face)"....
Furthermore, they also asked me to explain why I was using their servers for, which I explained to stand up a VM in neutral countries such as Singapore in which WeChat is not banned, in the event that Trump follows through with his executive order to fully ban/block WeChat then I will the option or ability to still communicate with the desktop WeChat app if installed on a server that was located in a country that didn't have to follow the Trump madness with regards to banning all apps/communication platforms solely based on national origin... I also told them my intent to use it as a bridge to transfer the game/dev files so that I can work with and collaborate with Chinese gamers on the aforementioned game.
This moving goalpost was already concerning to me, if they needed a photo of me holding it next to my face why didn't they just list this as the requirement in the first place? In any case, I didn't want my account deactivated so I proceed with taking a photo of me holding my government ID next to my face and when I tried uploading this through the VULTR account portal, their uploading system rejected it based on size limitations... but if I cropped/resized or downsized the photo quality too much (in order to fit the ridiculously low size restriction) it wouldn't be clear enough to show the words on the government ID when held next to my face which would defeat the whole point in the first place.
When I replied back directly to the support email with the photo attachments, I get a bounce back basically saying that no attachments were allowed and/or the attachments were stripped from email for security reasons etc etc...
Obviously beyond frustrated at this point in time, I write back again to the Support stating that it was nonsense that a cloud hosting company that requires users to jump through hoops to prove identity at the threat of their accounts being immediately terminated would also make it nearly impossible for the end user to supply this information because of artificial and arbitrary limitations on upload file size! (my photo was well under 8MB )
Literally minutes after I sent this second email to VULTR complaining about the whole situation, my entire account and everything in it was immediately, abruptly, suddenly and permanently terminated. I was actually in the rdp session remoted into one of the virtual servers that I had been paying for at the time, and the remote session just went dark and closed out on me. At first I thought it was just a glitch or temporary connection issue, but after a couple of more tries and the Rdp reconnect attempts getting nowhere, I realized something was wrong and decided to log back into the VULTR portal... While my VULTR portal access was already restricted/limited (I wasn't able to start up any new VMs or servers etc or provision anything else nor did I have access to billing page etc) up to that point in time I could at least access the parts of the portal that allowed me to see existing provisions and also to respond back to their support requests etc.. but now when I tried to log back into the VULTR portal it just says that account doesn't exists....
That is when I knew they must have terminated my entire account... So I wrote back one more time to VULTR support stating that I felt this Australian based company was intentionally and selectively targeting Chinese users and that the only reason I was unfairly singled out was because of national origin / and/or ethnicity...
I did a little digging and found out that the VULTR support person that I had been harassed by ( Nachelle Correa ) was actually a huge MAGA hat Trump supporter and not only that, she and that LITRUV dude had actually literally been lovers in the past and were friends and had photos together on facebook from when they dated a long while ago....
So to my shock I messaged back VULTR and stated that I would be asking my credit card company for a charge back, not only had I gotten screwed over by LITRUV, but the very hosting service that he recommended VULTR had shafted me and screwed me over as well...
A few days later I get a final email response from VULTR, this time from a different account representative only listed by the name of "Katie S." whom stated that they would offer me a full refund and that because I used profanity in my email to their support that that was the real reason they decided to terminate my account.
Several weeks go by and I kept checking my Bank of America online for a refund and never received one so I finally did a chargeback and got my money back that way....
So I thought that was the final end of it all....
Well fast forward to September of 2021, a full year later, I work in the IT department of an Oil company and was having lunch with a couple of coworkers whom happened to be in the Security group of the IT department and we went on chatting and one of them let it slip that a year ago they had done an investigation of my rdp usage while at work because some hosting company had contacted them and had expressed concern that I might be using it for nefarious reasons. While I had indeed connected to the VULTR servers a couple times while at work (mostly to quickly check on something to make sure I wasn't paying for hours while the server wasn't even functioning properly etc) it must have given VULTR incoming ip address information to allow them to lookup the company that I worked for and then they vindictively and maliciously contacted my company to either make entirely false allegations or for the purposes of a covert blackball smear campaign of sorts...
So after I found out this I dug up my chain of support emails that I had sent/exchanged with VULTR about a year ago and told them how I really felt about these low life AUKUSes (this happened to be right around the time that Australia joined the AUKUS pack and the Australia media which is supported by the Australian government had just publically called for the coup of Xi and the overthrow of the Chinese government etc), finally I told them how I really felt and that their underhanded tactics had been exposed... I never heard back from them so that was the end of it, or again so I thought....
Couple days later, all of a sudden I wake up one morning to an automated message from my email provider (Protonmail) that the "DNS issues detected for your custom domain" was no longer valid... my primary domain is ends in .com TLD and that is mostly what I use but for redundancy purposes I had also previously signed up for a couple of Swiss TLD domains ending in .ch with a domain registration company called SwitchPlus which had later merged or been bought by swizzonic.ch/ and one of my .ch domains I had used as a custom domain for my email.... It just so happened that I had originally signed up to the VULTR account with his custom domain email account ending in .ch and all of my email correspondences to VULTR support had always came from this same exact .ch email account.
I didn't have any issues with my other .com (which is hosted by a different domain provider called domain.com) email accounts and only my .ch custom domain failed... I had prepaid for several years and never had an issue with this domain before. So I log into my swizzonic.ch and realize that the configuration information for the aforementioned .ch custom domain had been wiped out along with the configuration of all of the other handful of .ch domains I had purchased and prepaid with swizzonic
While I could still log into my main swizzonic account, I couldn't edit my purchased domains, I couldn't renew them, I couldn't delete or even select any of them for any action at all... My account was effectively locked and in view only mode, with all the configuration deleted and removed, and this was causing all the emails that were being sent to my .ch custom domain to fail...
I reached out to swizzonic support and got on the line with them after many attempts and finally they disclosed that recently they had received an abuse report and that based on the information provided to them in the abuse report they decided to suspend my account. Obviously they refused to tell me directly who sent this so-called abuse report but after I asked to be shown some evidence of this false allegation they then sent me a image of one heavily redacted email (with headers not showing etc) that I was able to deduce was indeed one of the recent emails that I had sent to VULTR support after I had found out by accident/inadvertently a year later that VULTR support tech who was friends with the racists Australian LITRUV dude (who scammed me out of couple hundred bucks) had blackballed me by maliciously spreading false rumors and making false allegations against me to my company, after all of this, VULTR not only never apologized nor admitted fault, they tripled and quadrupled down by further maliciously abusing their status as a hosting company to contact the swizzonic domain registration company and providing them false and incomplete information for the vindictive and evil purpose of continuing to persecute and harass me and this time getting not only my email domain (and thus that custom email address) wiped out by even all the other domains that I had purchased for other websites and services that had nothing at all to do with VULTR and were never used to communicate with VULTR nor to sign up to any VULTR account or service....
Vultr Cloud Servers Reviews
So back in summer of 2020 during the COVID shutdowns and remote work from home I signed up to some udemy courses and taught myself a little bit of Unreal Engine in order to be able to create a computer PC game of my own using Unreal Engine with the intent of later uploading it to the Steam gaming platform...
As a beginner to UE gaming engine there were some issues that I couldn't easily resolve on my own so I contacted a guy by the name of LITRUV as he had a website that was offering a live session by the hour 'real time' remote Unreal Engine help/tutorial service... So I set up a couple hours with him and our first session went well enough until he realized that my game was essential a 3D simulator of a Chinese nuke (specifically the DF-41) and then he started laughing and making jokes of the fact that I choose a Chinese nuke to make a game around...
Since I had prepaid him for several hours, after our first sessions I promptly confirmed and scheduled with him the second session. As he is from Australia and our sessions were "live", we had to agree ahead of time on date/time that worked for the both of us (I was Central Time Zone in the USA) and so we agreed on the next time slot and I thought all was well... Come time for the second session (which I already prepaid) this LITRUV guy doesn't join the session even though from his ID (we had previously exchanged ParSec, TeamViewer, and Discord/Twitch account info) it was clear to me he was actively online at the time... so he totally ignores me and blows past the entire hour, then at the end of the hour he has the audacity to turn around and accuse me of being a "no-show" and thereby stating that I had forfeited the rest of my credits because he perceived that I gave him "attitude" etc etc etc...
During our first session, before he started acting racists and exposed his anti-Chinese sentiments, I had asked him what hosting platform he used when he showed me his new site (website that he put out his Unreal Engine gaming help service etc) that he created in which he answered that he preferred to host on VULTR rather than the likes of Rackspace, AWS, GCP or Azure and he said this was because VULTR was a Australian company and that it was smaller and had more of a family feel to it, stating that he personally knew several fellow sysadmin/etc friends that worked at VULTR....
Based on this I had decided to give VULTR a try and signed up for an account. I liked that VULTR seemed to have lower prices than Azure or AWS and that it had option to spin up VM servers in a diverse geographically region... At the time I was also with some online Steam friends who were physically located in China and were interested in helping me work on my DF-41 Unreal Engine project/game... but since the likes of Dropbox were banned in China and Microsoft cloud services and Google Drive/Store servers were either slow or nonfunctional, I needed to use the VULTR server to spin up a server in their Singapore region which at the time was neither throttled nor censored from the US side nor the Chinese side...
This was again the summer of 2021 and one of the heights of US-China tensions with Trump threatening to ban WeChat/TikTok/DJI and basically all things Chinese so since my Unreal Engine project files were quite large I needed to find a neutral intermediary to exchange game development files with folks in China who were willing to take a look and offer help with my project/game....
I had previously told this LITRUV guy that I would be checking out the VULTR that he promoted and told me about and after LITRUV turned full racists and went gloves off, I knew I wouldn't be getting my money back for the unused credits so I told him I was going to write a report on him and expose his unethical tactics publicly online... He then told me he was going to get his friend at VULTR to basically get back at me for it, and I shrugged it off at the time but some days later I got what at first appeared to be an automated email from VULTR stating that "Additional Verification Needed" and that "Due to recent activity on your account, our billing department requests additional information to verify your account."
Less than a day later after I received that email, even before I had time to act on it, I received a second follow up email stating that if I did not respond within 24 hours that my account would be terminated... So I immediately responded with the required info, which was clearly listed as needing "A photo of your government ID (showing a name and photo only)" and also "A partial photo of your Credit Card (showing the last four numbers & name only)."
I didn't even bother to redact out anything and just sent the full photo of my government ID and also my credit card that was on file with them. (I had pre-paid and was not behind on any payments etc)
Figuring that was the end of it, I forgot about this incident until the very next day I'm surprised and shocked to receive yet another email, this time demanding new requirements (after I had already successfully submitted the information that was initially requested) and asking that I now provide "A photo of you holding the recently uploaded ID (next to face)"....
Furthermore, they also asked me to explain why I was using their servers for, which I explained to stand up a VM in neutral countries such as Singapore in which WeChat is not banned, in the event that Trump follows through with his executive order to fully ban/block WeChat then I will the option or ability to still communicate with the desktop WeChat app if installed on a server that was located in a country that didn't have to follow the Trump madness with regards to banning all apps/communication platforms solely based on national origin... I also told them my intent to use it as a bridge to transfer the game/dev files so that I can work with and collaborate with Chinese gamers on the aforementioned game.
This moving goalpost was already concerning to me, if they needed a photo of me holding it next to my face why didn't they just list this as the requirement in the first place? In any case, I didn't want my account deactivated so I proceed with taking a photo of me holding my government ID next to my face and when I tried uploading this through the VULTR account portal, their uploading system rejected it based on size limitations... but if I cropped/resized or downsized the photo quality too much (in order to fit the ridiculously low size restriction) it wouldn't be clear enough to show the words on the government ID when held next to my face which would defeat the whole point in the first place.
When I replied back directly to the support email with the photo attachments, I get a bounce back basically saying that no attachments were allowed and/or the attachments were stripped from email for security reasons etc etc...
Obviously beyond frustrated at this point in time, I write back again to the Support stating that it was nonsense that a cloud hosting company that requires users to jump through hoops to prove identity at the threat of their accounts being immediately terminated would also make it nearly impossible for the end user to supply this information because of artificial and arbitrary limitations on upload file size! (my photo was well under 8MB )
Literally minutes after I sent this second email to VULTR complaining about the whole situation, my entire account and everything in it was immediately, abruptly, suddenly and permanently terminated. I was actually in the rdp session remoted into one of the virtual servers that I had been paying for at the time, and the remote session just went dark and closed out on me. At first I thought it was just a glitch or temporary connection issue, but after a couple of more tries and the Rdp reconnect attempts getting nowhere, I realized something was wrong and decided to log back into the VULTR portal... While my VULTR portal access was already restricted/limited (I wasn't able to start up any new VMs or servers etc or provision anything else nor did I have access to billing page etc) up to that point in time I could at least access the parts of the portal that allowed me to see existing provisions and also to respond back to their support requests etc.. but now when I tried to log back into the VULTR portal it just says that account doesn't exists....
That is when I knew they must have terminated my entire account... So I wrote back one more time to VULTR support stating that I felt this Australian based company was intentionally and selectively targeting Chinese users and that the only reason I was unfairly singled out was because of national origin / and/or ethnicity...
I did a little digging and found out that the VULTR support person that I had been harassed by ( Nachelle Correa ) was actually a huge MAGA hat Trump supporter and not only that, she and that LITRUV dude had actually literally been lovers in the past and were friends and had photos together on facebook from when they dated a long while ago....
So to my shock I messaged back VULTR and stated that I would be asking my credit card company for a charge back, not only had I gotten screwed over by LITRUV, but the very hosting service that he recommended VULTR had shafted me and screwed me over as well...
A few days later I get a final email response from VULTR, this time from a different account representative only listed by the name of "Katie S." whom stated that they would offer me a full refund and that because I used profanity in my email to their support that that was the real reason they decided to terminate my account.
Several weeks go by and I kept checking my Bank of America online for a refund and never received one so I finally did a chargeback and got my money back that way....
So I thought that was the final end of it all....
Well fast forward to September of 2021, a full year later, I work in the IT department of an Oil company and was having lunch with a couple of coworkers whom happened to be in the Security group of the IT department and we went on chatting and one of them let it slip that a year ago they had done an investigation of my rdp usage while at work because some hosting company had contacted them and had expressed concern that I might be using it for nefarious reasons. While I had indeed connected to the VULTR servers a couple times while at work (mostly to quickly check on something to make sure I wasn't paying for hours while the server wasn't even functioning properly etc) it must have given VULTR incoming ip address information to allow them to lookup the company that I worked for and then they vindictively and maliciously contacted my company to either make entirely false allegations or for the purposes of a covert blackball smear campaign of sorts...
So after I found out this I dug up my chain of support emails that I had sent/exchanged with VULTR about a year ago and told them how I really felt about these low life AUKUSes (this happened to be right around the time that Australia joined the AUKUS pack and the Australia media which is supported by the Australian government had just publically called for the coup of Xi and the overthrow of the Chinese government etc), finally I told them how I really felt and that their underhanded tactics had been exposed... I never heard back from them so that was the end of it, or again so I thought....
Couple days later, all of a sudden I wake up one morning to an automated message from my email provider (Protonmail) that the "DNS issues detected for your custom domain" was no longer valid... my primary domain is ends in .com TLD and that is mostly what I use but for redundancy purposes I had also previously signed up for a couple of Swiss TLD domains ending in .ch with a domain registration company called SwitchPlus which had later merged or been bought by swizzonic.ch/ and one of my .ch domains I had used as a custom domain for my email.... It just so happened that I had originally signed up to the VULTR account with his custom domain email account ending in .ch and all of my email correspondences to VULTR support had always came from this same exact .ch email account.
I didn't have any issues with my other .com (which is hosted by a different domain provider called domain.com) email accounts and only my .ch custom domain failed... I had prepaid for several years and never had an issue with this domain before. So I log into my swizzonic.ch and realize that the configuration information for the aforementioned .ch custom domain had been wiped out along with the configuration of all of the other handful of .ch domains I had purchased and prepaid with swizzonic
While I could still log into my main swizzonic account, I couldn't edit my purchased domains, I couldn't renew them, I couldn't delete or even select any of them for any action at all... My account was effectively locked and in view only mode, with all the configuration deleted and removed, and this was causing all the emails that were being sent to my .ch custom domain to fail...
I reached out to swizzonic support and got on the line with them after many attempts and finally they disclosed that recently they had received an abuse report and that based on the information provided to them in the abuse report they decided to suspend my account. Obviously they refused to tell me directly who sent this so-called abuse report but after I asked to be shown some evidence of this false allegation they then sent me a image of one heavily redacted email (with headers not showing etc) that I was able to deduce was indeed one of the recent emails that I had sent to VULTR support after I had found out by accident/inadvertently a year later that VULTR support tech who was friends with the racists Australian LITRUV dude (who scammed me out of couple hundred bucks) had blackballed me by maliciously spreading false rumors and making false allegations against me to my company, after all of this, VULTR not only never apologized nor admitted fault, they tripled and quadrupled down by further maliciously abusing their status as a hosting company to contact the swizzonic domain registration company and providing them false and incomplete information for the vindictive and evil purpose of continuing to persecute and harass me and this time getting not only my email domain (and thus that custom email address) wiped out by even all the other domains that I had purchased for other websites and services that had nothing at all to do with VULTR and were never used to communicate with VULTR nor to sign up to any VULTR account or service....