VPN Company Raided by Police Force
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A Swedish VPN company reported that police forces had attempted to seize computers from its office.
“On April 18th, at least six police officers from the National Operations Department (NOA) of the Swedish Police visited the Mullvad VPN office in Gothenburg with a search warrant. They intended to seize computers with customer data,” the company said.
Unlike many other VPN services, Mullvad doesn’t require an email address to sign up and instead generates a random account number for all users.
“We argued they had no reason to expect to find what they were looking for and any seizures would therefore be illegal under Swedish law,” Mullvad writes. “After demonstrating that this is indeed how our service works and them consulting the prosecutor, they left without taking anything and without any customer information.”
Mullvad says this is the first time in its 14 years of operating a VPN that police have issued a search warrant, and company CEO Jan Jonsson tells The Verge he doesn’t “know exactly what they were looking for.” Even if the authorities had seized its servers, Jonsson says that police wouldn’t have found anything due to its strict policies against keeping data.
“We find it peculiar that the National Operations Department (NOA) of the Swedish Police make this search warrant visit now, for the first time in our 14-year history,” Jonsson tells The Verge. “They should know by now how our service works. Our business is all about the fight against data retention and we never store any activity logs of any kind.”
