How Law Enforcement Is Taking Down Criminal VPN Services

Over the past few years, police and security agencies around the world have launched a coordinated campaign against VPN services built specifically for criminals. These operations have dismantled networks that enabled ransomware attacks, fraud, and other cybercrime — and they signal a shift in how authorities approach the infrastructure that supports criminal activity.

The pattern is notable because, unlike traditional law enforcement efforts that chase individual criminals, these operations focus on cutting off the tools criminals depend on. It is the infrastructure itself that becomes the target.

What Makes These VPNs Different

To understand what's happening, it helps to know the difference between a legitimate VPN and a criminal one. A regular VPN is a piece of software that encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through a server elsewhere, masking your location and identity from websites you visit. Privacy-minded people use them for legitimate reasons: keeping their activity private from their internet provider, or accessing content blocked in their country.

Criminal VPNs work on the same principle, but they're designed from the ground up to help illegal activity. They're marketed directly to criminals on underground forums, they require little or no identity verification, and they accept cryptocurrency payments to avoid leaving a financial trail. Unlike mainstream VPN companies, they make no pretense of running a legitimate business.

The Major Takedowns

Several high-profile operations between 2021 and 2024 have dismantled these criminal-focused networks.

Safe-Inet was described by Europol as a favorite among cybercriminals. A global law enforcement action took the service offline and seized its infrastructure, effectively removing a key anonymization tool that criminals had relied on.

VPNLab.net was disabled in an operation called "Operation Nova," which involved U.S. law enforcement working with international partners to seize or disrupt 15 servers. The service has remained unavailable since.

DoubleVPN, which charged customers $25 for access to its criminal-focused network, was eliminated after the National Crime Agency led an international investigation, with the UK agency taking down a domestic server as part of the broader effort.

The Botnet Trick: 911 S5

The most elaborate case involved something more insidious: the 911 S5 operation, which combined a botnet (a network of infected computers controlled remotely) with VPN-like functionality.

Here's how it worked. The operators created free VPN apps with names like MaskVPN, DewVPN, PaladinVPN, ProxyGate, ShieldVPN, and ShineVPN. These apps looked legitimate, but they contained hidden code — called a backdoor — that secretly connected users' devices to a criminal network. When someone downloaded and installed one of these apps, their computer became part of the botnet without their knowledge. Criminals could then rent access to this network of compromised devices and use it to mask their own activities online.

The FBI, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, and Department of Commerce's Office of Export Enforcement issued a public warning identifying these malicious apps. The botnet was ultimately dismantled through a coordinated international operation, and its administrator was arrested.

How Criminals Use These Services

Ransomware groups were primary customers for these criminal VPNs. They used them to hide their communications with infected computers, to secretly steal data from victims before demanding payment, and to negotiate ransoms without being traced. Fraud operations and money laundering schemes also relied heavily on these services — any criminal activity that required hiding an internet connection benefited from them.

Unlike Tor (the anonymity network most people associate with the dark web), these criminal VPN services offered something different: they were faster and easier to use at scale, making them ideal for organized crime operations that needed reliable, persistent anonymization.

A Shift in Law Enforcement Strategy

This coordinated approach to dismantling criminal infrastructure represents an evolution in how police agencies tackle cybercrime. Rather than pursuing individual hackers one at a time, authorities have recognized that removing shared infrastructure can disrupt multiple criminal enterprises simultaneously. It's an approach that proved effective against bulletproof hosting providers and criminal marketplaces in the past.

The broader context here is that removing an anonymization layer that multiple criminal groups depend on has far larger ripple effects than arresting individual actors. When a critical piece of shared infrastructure disappears, it forces criminals to find alternatives or rebuild from scratch, which costs money, time, and introduces operational risk.

The Adaptation Problem

There is, however, a complicating factor. As traditional criminal VPN services have been taken down, threat actors have begun moving toward more sophisticated evasion methods. The 911 S5 botnet model — using compromised consumer devices instead of dedicated servers — represents a significant escalation in technical sophistication.

The concern worth flagging is that these takedowns, while substantial victories, may ultimately drive criminals toward more decentralized and resilient anonymization architecture. Instead of relying on a single criminal VPN company that law enforcement can identify and dismantle, they're shifting to distributed networks of compromised devices, which are much harder to track and shut down as a unified target. The technical cat-and-mouse game continues, with each enforcement win potentially pushing criminals toward the next innovation.

The International Coordination Problem

Every one of these operations required law enforcement agencies across multiple countries to work together. The criminal networks themselves are borderless — they operate across jurisdictions and store infrastructure wherever it's convenient — so dismantling them requires the same borderless approach. This international coordination has improved over time, but it remains one of the most critical factors in making these takedowns work.

A Reminder About Impersonation

Europol has separately warned that criminals are now impersonating the agency itself, along with senior law enforcement staff, to defraud people. This parallel threat is a reminder that as technical infrastructure becomes harder to maintain, criminals adapt by pivoting toward social engineering — making their scams more convincing through false authority rather than better technology.

What this underscores is that technical takedowns alone aren't a complete solution. Threat actors have multiple tactics, and when one avenue becomes risky, they shift to another. Both individuals and organizations need to stay alert to both sophisticated technical threats and increasingly convincing fraud attempts that misuse the credibility of law enforcement agencies.