As seen in the Reddit post comments, this statement depicts him very well.
…”Benjamin Van Pelt the CEO of TorGuard can’t hide from the truth, the truth will come no matter what and when that happens, he can’t get away from it.
It sure is a pitty.”
Barely after a Year of writing the above statement, he again found a way to continue its own downfall.
Torguard VPN’s CEO Benjamin Van Pelt not Trustworthy
Torguard and its CEO Benjamin Van Pelt exposed for lying, scamming and diminishing the value of Business relationships between Hosting Providers, Credit card providers and card processing companies. What you are about to read is a true and documented interaction between Torguard VPN, its CEO Benjamin Van Pelt and CTO once again chose a strategic manipulative tactic to take advantage of our hard-work and break away from their financial responsibility. We hope that this very true and transparent review of Torguard VPN and its Management team provides a first hand testimonial of how Hosting providers are treated and dimunished, lied to and cheated on with little to no regards to ethics, contract agreements, AUPs, SLAs and Terms.
How Cloudfitters help Businesses
As a small hosting provider, Cloudfitters is proud to have been able to cater to large and small companies by launching its own proprietary infrastructure rather than becoming a reseller. By doing so, we signed multi-year conracts directly with ISPs such as ATT, LUMEN, SPRINT, Windstream, Comcast. We signed with Highly graded and certified Datacenters such as Equinix, Databank, Coresite, SBA Edge. The value for us is the ability to take control of our service catalog, customization and attractive pricepoints to help Businesses worldwide become efficient and cost-effective with a compliance and security stance. The downside to that is the high cost of building and maintaining such infrastructure: Networking and Computing appliances, Fiber and Bandwidth usage, monthly space and power usage cost.
A pattern and a Culture of deceit by Benjamin Van Pelt
Torguard VPN via CEO Benjamin Van Pelt became a customer in January of 2023 at Cloudfitters and have been a client for 17 months. During its tenure, Torguard has violated AUPs. Torguard VPN users were able to successfully steal copyrighted intellectual property that would eventiually impact our relationship and tarnish our reputation with our Service Provider Lumen. Isn’t such piracy against the very lawsuit lawsuit that was settled with a stipulation that ““Pursuant to a confidential settlement agreement, Plaintiffs have requested, and Defendant has agreed to use commercially reasonable efforts to block BitTorrent traffic on its servers in the United States using firewall technology,” Benjamin Van Pelt is clearly aware of the severity of such infringement as he sees himself in the middle of few lawsuits such as the Greece case, as well as its blatant loss and dismissed court case as NordVPN pointed out Torguard VPN own flaws vulnerability.
Lies and Scams by Torguard VPN’s CEO Ben Van Pelt
In light of the legal troubles mentioned above, we now understand why Torguard VPN quickly jumped on the idea of providing VPN Services using residential ISPs and IP subnets. If VPNs are showing residential IPs, it seldomly raises a red flag. After signing a 12 months prepaid contract with Cloudfitters, we extended a more than generous discount. Due to end-users activities, our ATT line was in violation of AUPs that led to our fiber connection being terminated prematurely. On May 14th 2024, we have permanently lost our ability to use ATT in Ashburn. As result Benjamin Van Pelt and many other clients canceled their service in Ashbun, but continued to use Lumen in Chicago. While Cloudfitters was losing money for AUP violation, we took on the responsibility to provide Torguard with a prorated amount that satisfies the downtime which was more than any SLA credit. They approved the adjustment with a 100% promise to pay.
Wrongful dispute with American Express by Ben Van Pelt
While one of our partner datacenter was undergoing an Emergency maintenance that took our network offline, Benjamin Van Pelt submits a dispute for a full 12 months refund claiming that “Services were not received as agreed”knowing they have used both ATT and LUMEN for nearly 10 months. When we approached Benjamin, He agreed in writing that our invoices will be paid with a pro-rate and that he needed us to send him a letter to refelct the length of time while online. We rushed him a letter that was ignored. According to him, He planned on sending the letter to AMEX. Helmy the CTO at Torguard then requested adjustments that we complied with. Afer resubmitting the invoices,Torguard’s CEO Benjamin Van Pelt indicated that payment is getting sent shortly. What seemed to be just hours turned into days without communication. He then asked that we wait for another 7 dyas to which we will comply as well.
Torguard VPN’s intentional delay to migrate away from its Hosting platform.
With patience, Cloudfitters awaited a fulfillment of a promise to pay while refraining from any counter-dispute with American Express. It’s here that we saw Benjamin Van Pelt clear betrayal playbook take place as he now have $17K in his bank account of which $11K belongs to Cloudfitters for services used. It’s also here that Helmy the CTO at Torguard would continue to state that Ben Van Pelt has all intent to pay while he slowly migrates away from our servers. Now that they have the entire prepaid $17K in their bank account without a counter dispute and all data migrated, Torguard VPN would gain the upper hand and Benjamin Van Pelt is empowered now to point at service interruption and degrardation. See the problem here is the blatant lie that prevented a counter dispute, an early disconnection for non-payment and the lack of transparency seen by the CEO himslef by not paying after 2 days, 3 days and 7 days as he promised.
Torguard VPN’s CEO Ben Van Pelt fabrication and Excuses
It seems there’s a level of attraction to sue with Ben! He himself escalates the issues and awaits for reaction. Now that Cloudfitters observed disrespect, false claims in conjuction with an empty promise to pay, we made it clear that we will take actions which included an in person bill collection process if needed. As a small company without a collection team, yes we will take matter in our own hands to get our money. As is, $11k has been stolen from a company that once protected the reputation of Torguard and accepted its violation and court subpoenas. The least any of our customer can do to include Torguard VPN is to remain true to its own promise and pay for services used. While there’s an attraction to amplify and provoke more chaos while relying on a judicial or court system, our approach was to resolve the issue in collaboration and communication. We avoided escalation and begged in messages and emails. What do we do in the face of silence and lack of response when promised payment is getting sent “tomorrow” or in 7 days then we are ignored even when we complied to Torguard’s demand?
Benjamin Van Pelt and Torguard VPN’s Reputation
A Business with a known pattern of ongoing legal battles that continue to validate its bad reputation will eventually end in failure. The Tech community has had enough already. Torguard VPN is therefore reflected in its entirety through its leader and CEO Benjaminm Van Pelt as he continue to sink its company deeper and deeper into irrelevancy and demonstrate dishonesty in as a CEO. By choosing to Not pay for services used by its company, our complaint are around the lack of transparency exhibited through the process:
- A wrongful dispute with its card holder American Express in order to benefit and further sink its Hosting provider.
- A promise to pay for Services used after the dispute was open to prevent a counter dispute by the Hosting provider.
- The lies and dishonesty exhibited after the full yearly prepaid was credited to its account by American Express
- The sneaky migration of services away from our infrastructue while pretending that they will pay just to gain more time to move away.
- Hiding behind service degradation as a reason to submit such dispute while disregarding the SLA credit already provided and approved by its own team!
- The intentional wrong accusation of criminality labeled as threats just to justify non-payment knowing the blatant failure to clear its invoices as promised caused any escalation.
- The pre-meditated master plan as described above reflects dishonesty, scam and violation of ethics and contract agreements.
Message to other Hosting providers, VPN customers and Business Community about Benjamin Van Pelt and Torguard VPN
As Hosting providers and other Businesses try to recover from an ongoing recession, we strongly advise to proceed with care when dealing with Ben Van Pelt. As proven above, He would consume your resources and refuse to pay knowing well that the used bandwidth internet resources belong to ISPs that charged you the provider a high price. Torguard VPN could sign their own contract with such providers, but chooses to piggy-back in order to discharge itself from intellectual property violations and subpoenas brought by US Department of Justice. Yes we have to deal with the FBI not you Ben. They would point fingers after their own action caused service degradation. Yes your customers used your VPN service to break the law Ben! To anyone looking for VPN services, Torguard VPN is not a good choice as we suspect it will eventually go out of Business in light of a CEO that has proved to be dishonnest and continues to put its company’s reputation on the line by engaging in deceptive tactics while getting sued and summoned by courts all over the world. Find a reliable VPN provider like Express VPN, Nord VPN and stay away.
The views and opinions observed are well documented and awaits Counsel review before release. We will engage American Express as well as the appropriate courts where previous infractions were recorded.