Very popular extension got banned due to a confusion (facts provided). Let’s work together to sort that out?

We are one of pioneers of the consumer VPN industry and take pride in that legacy. Our browser add-ons have genuine customer love and we were about to push it for greater growth following more than a year of production testing and customer usage habits.

On one hand we truly appreciate that Mozilla puts so much emphasis on community moderation. On the other hand we are greatly concerned that being a Security & Privacy company in business for over a decade, on a joint mission for which Mozilla is a hallmark and it’s employees and supporters work day and hard, we are being doubted for such uncalled for, totally unethical practices.

Recently our addon was removed from firefox store without any clarification request and that too for an activity that occurred almost a year ago. We just received these message from AMO reviewer Andreas Wagner and the next thing we know is that our addon was disabled from the Store.

  • This add-on has been disabled because of fraudulent review activity we have detected. In particular, you have rated your own add-on several times.

  • We have identified several ratings from January 18 and January 25 2018 to be self-ratings. We will no longer accept further submissions of this add-on.

We wrote back to Andreas Wagner and amo-admins@mozilla.org, it has been two weeks and there has been no response. We don’t have any idea who to write further on this. Our extension has a rating of 4.4 with 17k+ User base. it’s really critical for our business to continue with the same extension.

Continuing our legacy of more than a decade we would want to draw your attention to a few facts that we compiled to support out argument:

a) We work out of a Co-working / Sister Ventures Space where there are at least 5-10 different ventures operating out at the same time. Though the ventures belong to different industries, it’s natural that some of those venture employees use our services and may have rated it genuinely (though we cannot get to the facts since we were not provided any sort of detail about those reviews, we are willing to go deeper into details and collaboratively solve it with Mozilla).

b) One of the Web’s most trusted platforms for reviews is TrustPilot.com where PureVPN.com (https://www.trustpilot.com/review/purevpn.com) enjoys one of the highest ratings 9.5/10. They have very strict anti-fake reviews policies as evident here (https://www.trustpilot.com/review/nordvpn.com) Please see the note posted on top related to Fake Reviews.

c) As evident from the point b, we take reviews as a Support Channel and have instead created an internal process to respond to those reviews one on one where needed. Furthermore our users (18,000+) and ratings (mere 320+) are totally proportionate thus resting your suspicion to rest that any such orchestrated rigging was ever undertaken by PureVPN itself.

We would like to reiterate that with over 18,000 daily active users and joint mission with Mozilla to defeat Privacy & Security, we would be obliged and want to continue contributing value to the Mozilla community.

Can someone please help with whom should we write and where? We still believe that it can be a minor human error, and reviewers will give chance to republish extensions on same account.

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Hi, thanks for reaching out! We’re reviewing this case and will be in touch on the amo-admins email thread.