By late 2023, a smarter trend emerged among budget-conscious users: . ExpressVPN didn’t offer a free tier, but services like ProtonVPN (free, no ads) and Windscribe (10GB/month free) became popular. For ExpressVPN specifically, users discovered:
The thread was detailed. A user named "CryptoHawk" posted step-by-step instructions, complete with fake screenshots of a command-line tool spitting out license keys. "Disable your antivirus first," it warned, "because the generator uses harmless exploits that AVs flag as false positives."
Another common 2023 scam was the "ExpressVPN account checker" – a tool that claimed to test leaked username/password combos from past data breaches. The scam worked like this: