What I saw while Salad was running:

- Large volumes of outbound requests to Sony, Amazon, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and other major domains.

- Traffic patterns that looked like scripted logins or scraping rather than normal browsing.

- Blocks and captchas escalating into permanent bans on several platforms

Notes:

- No local VPN active

- Issue stops when I stop Salad

- I was logging all the requests coming through while I had no other browsers or applications passing network traffic.

- Aren’t VPN companies all boasting about NO LOG POLICIES? I didn’t sign any agreements with your clients and I’m clearly logging the network requests. So much for that policy I suppose.

- Is Salad responsible for doing a KYC on customers that are using GPU’s and Network Bandwidth? How do you manage that with millions of VPN clients you have no communication with?

I understand Bandwidth Sharing routes third-party traffic, but the way it’s being used here is creating real risk for the end user whose IP is exposed.

Questions for anyone that follows this Salad product or maybe any Salad supporters here:

Is this expected behaviour for Bandwidth Sharing?

Is there any filtering to prevent abusive or credential-stuffing-like traffic?

Any reliable way to repair IP reputation after this happens? If the official guidance is “disable Bandwidth Sharing,” that’s a bit harsh as most users may not even fully understand the repercussions until it’s too late. As a company wouldn’t it be more responsible to only sell bandwidth and GPU to companies where you actually know the end company/user? I may be missing something but from what I understood companies doing this are responsible for doing a KYC on the end user. How are you doing a KYC on the end user of the VPN service routing traffic through users like me? Who’s accountable for the legal fees, service fees and more that are being imposed in the US and other countries by many isps for abuse related matters?

Happy to share scrubbed logs if it helps. Looking for concrete steps to avoid repeats or to remediate the bans. This is important for all users like myself to consider.