Legal remedies

It made tons of money by selling proxying through residential IPs. Users used Hola VPN for free, by selling their 'ip' or use as a proxy for companies that wanted to scrape or check sites from 'real ips'. That service was called Luminati back then, but it is now Bright Data.

I believe the scrapers are using that company, or some competitor, though I guess Hola + Bright Data is probably the biggest provider around still. So that's why the requests seem to come from all around the world with no real system to the IPs, it is because they are *actually* coming from real residential homes and computers.

> 299. million free users
> Because we believe in democratizing access to online content, our free desktop and Android versions accomplish exactly this, while you contribute a small amount of resources to our peer-to-peer community network.

So legally obtained even, since it's in the TOS and even marketing material for Hola.

All very sad.