VPN? Long live Greek justice

The story begins in June 2023, when the Canadian Department of Justice, under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) process, sent a summons to Yegor Sak (CEO of Windscribe), stating that he was being charged in Greece with the crime of “unlawful access to an information system.”

It was 100 pages of almost incomprehensible information. In short, they reported that an IP address belonging to one of Windscribe's servers in Finland was used to compromise a server in Greece.

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Given the nature of VPNs, some of them are sometimes used to commit crimes. This is why some people say that VPNs should be banned, but this is a completely wrong approach. By this logic, we should ban cars and hammers, since 0,0001% of those who own these items can harm people.

When a Windscribe user does something illegal, the company usually receives a subpoena that includes an IP address and a timestamp related to the alleged crime. The company receives 5-10 such subpoenas per month. However, as a VPN service that does not log user behavior, they state this fact and in 99,9% of cases this clears up the matter, as they are not required to store log files.

But with Greece, things turned out differently . The Greek authorities, with the help of INTERPOL, subpoenaed the server hosting provider in Finland to find out who had rented the server. In this case, it was Yegor Sak. This account, like 100+ other accounts the company has with various hosting providers worldwide, is a corporate account and the fact that Windscribe, a VPN provider, had the server was indisputable.

The Greek authorities took the only name that appeared on the account, and initiated criminal proceedings against Yegor Sak, as if he had committed the alleged crime himself.

Although Windscribe has legal representation in Canada, it can't do much in international criminal proceedings, so it had to hire legal counsel in Greece.

This began a nearly 2-year adversarial process in an Athens court. As you can imagine, moving from Canada is quite expensive. It would have been much faster (and cheaper) to simply hand over the logs to identify the real culprit behind the alleged crime. However, they couldn’t hand over something they don’t have. So begins Yegor Sak’s adventure!

December 2023

The first hearing was supposed to take place in December 2023, where he hoped the case would be dismissed. Unfortunately, due to a lawyers' strike, all cases were postponed, so a new date was set for March 2024.

March 2024

The first hearing took place, but it did not go as planned. The court informed Yegor Sak that he now has a co-defendant, in Morocco, and that the Moroccan authorities did not submit the necessary documents for the case to proceed. Yegor Sak and his lawyer tried to separate the 2 cases, but this was not possible. So the trial of the case was postponed once again to April 2025.

The wheels of justice indeed move slowly.

April 2025

On April 11, 2025, Yegor Sak finally managed to stand trial and was found not guilty, or rather the case was dismissed.

Long live justice!

giorgos

George is still wondering what he is doing here….