> And when people _are_ shopping around, they search for things like "best vpn providers 2022"
Which coincidentally a number of VPN "review" sites were purchased and the lists "updated" to recommend a certain owner that I'm fairly certain at this point is a honeypot.
https://restoreprivacy.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn...
https://www.techradar.com/news/pc-mag-owner-j2-global-buys-s...
Kape Technologies was formerly known as Crossrider before it was acquired by Teddy Sagi, an Israeli billionaire that has spent time in jail for insider trading. Crossrider itself never had that great a reputation itself, what with their primary product being a development platform through which they were frequently used by third parties to invade ad platforms to serve up malware.