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A Guy in China Fined 145k USD for using VPN to access 'International internet' for remote work
PhantomPain
Member
The police document shows that this guy used VPN to access 'International internet' to get work tasks from Github and Zoom was fined 1,058,000 CNY (~145k USD) which is all his salary for working for a foreign company in Turkey in the past three years.
Source: https://weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309404949447133233199
As necessary working conditions may not be legally available in all countries, tech companies should be more open to anonymous remote workers and cryptocurrency payments. 
Comments
Damn.
Now he's got a costly "work order" to resolve with the police
good luck mjjs
Wrong. Look at it the other way around. People should rise up and change their government with visionary politicians who care about all humans. The problem is not the payment currency, nor the technology; the problem is within any government who does not accept freedom of humanity. The elephant in the room is the law which needs to be addressed.
That's only workable in an ideal world with no crime. What do you think the Treasury will do when they see companies hiring anonymous workers and paying them in cryptos? Patting them in the back for helping people in a shithole country, or opening an investigation to verify it's not a front for organized crime?
Some governments might be OK with verified-identity workers being paid in crypto since at least they can verify that the workers comply with laws & regulations (taxes, export control, sanctions, etc.), but when companies conjure employees out of thin air and pay them without any accountability is just begging for trouble.
If one believes tea drinkers will invite the wrath of Cthulhu, the government arresting tea drinkers and censoring anything about tea on the internet is the visionary government they need who cares about all humans.
Switch beverages with religious beliefs, sexual orientation, or political opinion, and that's how people in certain countries believe their government is the defender of civilization and anyone thinking otherwise must be corrected in a facility.
Back in 2017 I had opportunity to move to China, but did not go at the end. Because of all these censorship and problems comes it. I read some article that time, foreigners were also arrested for using VPN.
Or, they should solve the problem that they themself created. Instead of asking everyone else, who does not have such a severe problem, to accommodate the people that won't solve it themself.
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I should not be on this forum if the fine is legal.
Whatever. One may think what they like. At any time the masses can throw down their government if they wish so - this is simply defined as revolution. It always happened in history and it will happen again and again as history repeats itself - no management system is perfect as it balances between greed of the few (for their own security) and freedom of many (to keep population happy). Nothing lasts forever. Nothing. This is the theory of conservation applied in relativity of everything (including human brains and societies).
As a government disconnects from the realities of masses, population may rise at any point to select someone else who cares about the happiness of many. If people are happy there is no need for change, therefore nobody will rise, therefore this fine should be paid.
@default xD
It's impossible to operate a company that way. Business expenses are tax-deductible, netted against business income and this would look like straight money laundering for the national financial administration as a company can't prove that money went for the salaries of real people.
A normal day in a totalitarian regime
Imagine saying to your tax agency that the 30K in bitcoin was to an anonymous worker in China
https://x.com/Pandazhq/status/1705944527725379699?s=20
not a tax issue, but being online illegally.
Sounds more to me like the message is "Don't hire remote workers in China, the legal system isn't stable enough."
It's a shame so many good people are held back by nazis.
This has always been a risk for those with Chinese citizenship, but from what I understand this is not a risk for foreigners. It's quite rare for people to actually be prosecuted for using VPNs though, the government generally doesn't care too much.
Yep, definitely not an issue, foreign students use their own self-hosted VPN all the time until graduation, and that includes students from countries whose leaders won't even care if one or two students suddenly disappear overseas.
The fine is also set to his salary, which led me to believe this is more about dealing with tax avoidance, foreign companies do have Chinese remote workers connecting through internal VPN without being clandestine.
That is one of the countless reasons why China would not rise to be a great economic power. Yes, they are the second biggest economy in the world because they have so many people, but, per capita, the Chinese are much poorer than Eastern Europeans are, on par with their "unlimited" allies, Russia and their protectorate, Kazakhstan.
For example, Estonia is more than twice richer per capita than China is. In PPP, even Romania is twice as rich as China is per capita.
This is because the SYSTEM is incapable of generating intrinsic growth, innovation, competition, disruption, things absolutely necessary for a healthy economic growth and lack of rule of law, even more, the deteriorating situation there, is going to weigh sooner rather than later on the international investment. People would notice that, overall, their profits elsewhere are bigger than in China, regardless of how many people China has, and the risks for the state to intervene and steal their investments is much lower in other places.
China is held back in its growth by their own government limiting its freedom to evolve and grow. However, this status quo might change at any point if people simply rise against their government. This whole situation of conflict between superpowers could trigger such behaviour anywhere. It remains see how things will turn out. We are witnessing big changes worldwide and hopefully next year our votes will count for something.
It wouldn't, that is the reason the last stage in an Imperial cycle is generalized aggression, the Emperor hopes that, by invading his neighbours, he can achieve one in two outcomes:
The Russian Empire was successful in two cases, in WWII when it started with the invasions of "Pribaltika", Poland, Romania, Finland etc and ended up defending against the Nazis, now, when started the war with occupations and invasions of Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine and still holds some of those lands, but is now defending and is successfully applying the siege mentality. It did fail in WWI, though, but greatly perfected the propaganda since then.
Yeah there are lots of foreign workers in the country connecting to VPNs. Typically though if you have enough workers you'll want to talk to a local police station who will be able to process requests to whitelist your IPs so they won't get GFW'd. From what I understand this doesn't actually require you to register an entity in the country, you just need to demonstrate that you'll be using it for work-related reasons. I believe this is the fully legal route to doing this, and I really don't think its too much of a hassle to avoid this kind of prosecution.
No, things should be like even though you talk to cops for normal use case, you will still get trouble if your destiny was written as so. The judicial system is still very unmature and broken here and there.
Ridiculous thing happens like if you wear Japanese style clothes (kimono or maybe anime cosplay) you will get arrested recently.
This is highly dependent on where you live and who you know at the local police department. So yeah immature legal system but this should not be surprising.
From my understanding though nobody has ever been prosecuted after they got a license though...
Damn how is BIlibili still in business :^)
Based on what I hear from my friends in Iran, their government does pretty much the same thing and even more. He (my friend) said that they are under worst internet restrictions that they have ever seen. I couldn't believe (it won't be worse than China right?) until he provided me with an Iranian server for a couple of hours. And I couldn't believe what I saw; there was constant (intentional) traffic disruptions, no UDP (!!!) and even the server must have had a specific ratio between inbound and unbound or else the provider suspects of hosting VPN and the server would be blocked and the ID of the buyer would be sent to police!
He said that there are severe consequences for those who sell VPN solutions.
145k fine for accessing the 'International internet'? Man, that's one expensive login
Oh wow, this is quite clever on their part. Tried brainstorming a way to get around it but it seemed impossible unless they acted as their own CDN and in turn, required MITMing the traffic, which would be really risky for the user since there's no way to tell it's a front of the regime themselves.
FWIW, my Snowflake (Tor entry node with obfuscated protocol) servers usually get inbound Iranian IPs even though they're almost halfway around the world. Russian IPs are rare, while Chinese IPs are almost non-existent, except for bots talking to my SSH honeypot.