Scam: Polar Backup Cloud Storage
Just a note before I get too far, this is the first thing I published on medium so I wanted to try it and see how it goes.
Doing some research looking for a backup solution for my FreeNAS server that I wanted to build, I look at many things like AWS S3 or AWS Glacier as well as some other services such as BackBlaze, etc. but one and only one stuck out to me, Polar Backup. They had the best deal, one could say it’s a once-in-a-lifetime deal!
TL;DR
In case it was not clear, Don’t buy it. 😆
This company is taking your money for some storage that will last until they have decided they have made enough money (around a year), then kiss it goodbye. Don’t think about using it either, people have reported that it is ultra-slow to even upload a file.
What they are doing
Polar Backup was offering 5TB of storage for a small price of $99.99 for a lifetime subscription. That means for $100 I could store 5 terabytes of data with no other limitations. Without skipping a beat I started to look on their website for some asterisk or a page for more detailed information related to the terms and service for restrictions. But I could not find a single thing. That got me kind of suspicious. So I did the next normal thing, I googled it. The only thing I could get was the website they hosted and the 10+ websites showing this deal. So I opened ALL of them.
When looking through all of the websites (a whole 30 seconds) all of them were the same. All of these websites were hosted by a single company, Stack Social. Stack Social gets paid to advertise “deals” (some are good don’t get me wrong) on software, VPN services, games, etc. but what through me for a loop is that this is the ONLY website that is showing this deal. You ask, Wait you said 10+ websites, how can it be the only 1?
Warning: Speculation
Stack Social gets paid to sell deals for coupons that can be redeemed for the service/product in question. They make their sales by advertising all of the deals via 3rd parties. They look to other geeky media outlets such as Android Authority and PC World to make a blog post to help advertise the deals making them seem like a lifesaver and you can expand your storage on your machine. But how are they different websites then? Well, all of the popular tech websites forward a subdomain to Stack Social and they provide a custom theme for their website so they keep their “reputable” brand and “trust” in the product. (Make sure to take a look at my Google Doc to see all of the brands that have posted it for money disrespecting your trust in them.)
[Rant] It also reaches the point where they claim that “if you love downloading movies or apps, you’ll be short on space eventually”(from WindowsCentral) … so yOu shOuLd bUy thIs dEaL bEcaUsE tHiS backup service wIlL gEt yOu mOre stOrage oN yUuR cOmPutEr.[/Rant]
I would like to point out that this only one example of the limited testing and lack of value that they have for people’s trust. When they make posts about a product that they get paid for or “gain better SEO scores” (I know someone is going to say it) they throw all trust out the window. I understand people need to make money and everything (which is why we still have ads on websites) but bluntly lying to people about products is not a way to do it.
Ok, what else besides Speculation
Well if you skipped to this part, good choice, straight to the facts, I like it.
All of the information below this point I have discovered just rooting around and researching related websites.
Claims that they offer for your plan:
- Lifetime Plans
- Backup Local, External, and network drives
- File Versioning
- GDPR Privacy Compliant
- Deduplication
- AES-256 bit Encryption
- more useless mumbo jumbo
You can find all of the claims listed on their website and all of the Stack Social Deal Links.
Website: p****bac***.com
- The domain is registered for 1 year, Registered on June 30th, 2019 (Not an issue just observation, Companies normally don’t register a domain for one year)
- The company was listed to be at Latokartanonkaari 3 00790 Helsinki Finland but has since changed its location on the website to 142 Cromwell Road, International House, London, England, SW7 4EFI so sometime between October 20th, 2019 and Today (October 30th, 2019) they moved their entire office 1,689 miles (2,718 km for my non-US friend). Also changing their footer from Designed with ♥ in Helsinki to Designed with ♥ in London.
- To also tie into the last point, looking at their Facebook page, I managed to see “Facebook Transparency”. This is a new feature Facebook is offering for business pages. One of the elements is where the page managers are located at. The image shows that the page managers originate out of Jordan. (Update Jan 29th, 2020)
- Website (Wordpress Install) still has ALL of the DEFAULT CONTENT. When you install WordPress it will create some default content that you can see what it looks like and actual people will just delete it and start to make their content accordingly. Well they didn’t, I guess they are not planning on staying for long…
- WP Content Directory is wide open! EVERYONE who works with WordPress even professional companies knows that they don’t leave directory indexing on in production, in this case, they didn’t care and left directory indexes ON showing all of the content they use for their theme pack, in this case, all of the stock icons and “employees”, using a simple curl script I was able to pull down based on the index all of the content.
- Something that throws a red flag would be that the entire website has NO CONTACT INFORMATION (sorry for the caps), no contact number, no email, no slack, no forum, nothing.
- When you do contact their “support” using the Wordpress Contact Form or using their tawk.to contact popup they respond using Google GSuite (not the problem) with a MailTrack plugin attached! Now I am not saying that they are tracking me open the email is the issue, its MailTrack, every company that I’ve communicated with via support will, 9 times out of 10 have the tracking on it but they are not advertising that they are using a service to track you opening the email.
- The last item that I will include in this would be their portal. Now looking at their portal it seems like I couldn’t do much unless I paid, well you would be wrong. I poked around in the code for the homepage and in the javascript, I was able to find that this portal is run by a 3rd party called Zoolz. Zoolz is a backup storage company like many others for MSPs and such, what makes this Polar Backup’s Service is the reseller account that they have. Polar Backup can pay a fee to Zoolz to be given a specific amount of storage that they can resell to us at a higher price. On the page, I was able to find 4 other online companies such as Polar Backup that operate through Zoolz. When doing other research I found that similar situations occurred when someone went for a deal like this sold through Dropbit (the fake company) selling storage as a reseller through Livedrive (closed now) and would have lost their backups if they didn’t contact Livedrive. The person sharing a statement made mention that the Livedrive company (who sold the Reseller account to Dropbit) did not receive fees from the Reseller for over 2 months which was the cause for this cancellation of his account.
I’m sure this is a long post but it's got a lot of content to provide input of what a scam it is and it's not just me saying it is.
You can find all of the raw details in my Google Docs form where it has an audit of the changes of when I added images of the site as well as some details that I’ve left out.
Conclusion
Don’t buy it. $100 for 5TB of storage is impossible to provide with the claims and the lifetime access mentioned. Some of the links within the Google Doc (r/DataHoarder) can show that more experienced people than myself can explain how they are doing what they are doing as well as how they sort of operate.
Well, there it is, my first post on Medium.
I’m sure I’ll be making a few edits once it’s posted but who knows.
