Our independent investigation reveals an interesting story between Kiet Chau and some of his previous mobile proxy resellers. One of the most well-known mobile proxy providers was ProxyGuys, which still appears operational under new ownership.
Back in January 2023, we were in contact with the owner of ProxyGuys Bradley Roekle. He provided us with a really interesting story of how they started, how things went sour, and how Kiet Chau ultimately completely poached (stole) all of their customers whom they had spent years working to onboard and retain. Here is what Mr. Roekley had to say…
I used to be a private reseller for Vivid-Hosting back in the days after being introduced to Kiet Chau through an internet marketing website called BlackHatWorld.com however after only being able to onboard a small number of clients I decided to start a completely new venture with a marketing friend and we officially formed ProxyGuys.com
– Bradley Roekle
We (ProxyGuys) were exclusive resellers for Vivid-Hosting for over three years however at one point in 2020 Bright Data was interested in acquiring our clients and Kiets network technology and during the course of this process we had to disclose some private financial information because the potential acquisition would include both ProxyGuys website & customer base along with the 4G mobile proxy technology from Vivid-Hosting and ever since we exchanged some private financial details the relationship with Kiet immediately changed.
The potential acquisition quickly failed as Kiet was asking for 20 Million just for the blueprints to his 4G proxy network technology and this figure does not include anything for ProxyGuys whom wanted another 6-8 Million. However, as Kiet had further insight into our profit margins and realized that we were doing very well (Gross sales were over 2.5 million) just a day later Kiet announced a massive price increase (Over $120,000 per year). Because our profit margins were slim as new competition kept popping up forcing us to lower our rates to remain competitive in the industry we pushed back on these rate hikes as we needed they were simply fueled by greed and would now allow us to remain competitive anymore. Not to mention that from Day one we were paying $125/mo per proxy license and selling as low as $135-$145 per month before taxes, merchant fees, and other various expenses, and as we passed over 2,000+ active proxy licenses with Kiet from Vivid-Hosting not once did we receive any kind of bulk volume discount or price relief of any kind.
I knew things were getting bad when Kiet made multiple attempts to get us to agree to paying an additional $120,000 – $250,000 for proxy licenses however the harder he pushed, the more we had to push back as we simply could not and would not be able to handle that additional expense, especially as we were begging for some kind of price drop to allow us to remain competitive and profitable.
Slowly things continued to get worse and worse. As we were paying Kiet Chau over $225,000 per month in proxy license fees the services being provided were being slowly degraded over time. Kiet kept removing features, reducing support and slowing down proxy servers the more we refused to comply with his demands for a massive rate increase. Suddenly we had multiple outages that would last hours if not longer, support was no longer 24/7 and reducted to business hours only (This business is a 24/7 operation) and Kiet was pushing out changes to the API that would break out automation system and cause undue stress on our own in house engineers without notice.
Then in December 2022 Kiet partnered with his other proxy reseller Marcus Mamolen from IPv4Depot to form MobileHop.com. When they did this, they immediately shut off our billing system and terminated our ability to order any additional proxy licenses but continued to charge our credit card o a daily basis for proxy renewals despite us being locked out of the billing system and unable to cancel anything. To make matters worse without any notice whatsoever Kiet immediately locked our proxy portal and terminated over 2,000 proxies which we have prepaid him over $225,000 per month for which sent all of our customers into a frenzy. As we were exclusively reselling for Vivid-Hosting this essentially shut down our business overnight and left us high and dry to the point that we were unable to refund customers for their proxy purchase as we had already forwarded over about 95% of what we collected to Kiet to pay for the licenses that were now terminated.
But it didn’t stop there. Kiet had a plan in place well before he shut off our proxy portal and terminated all of our clients. Kiet put a notice in our white labeled proxy panel (which he hosted and controlled) telling all of our private clients to signup directly with MobileHop.com in order to continue their proxy service and even offered them special “rescue us” saving codes to encourage them to signup. Basically Kiet Chau unlawfully and unethically poached/stole ALL of our customers. He was further prepared by having a “sales thread” on BlackHatWorld which he had learned was a large source of clients for us during our acquisition talks with Bright Data that failed the year prior. Basically he took all of the private information that we shared with him during the failed acquisition talks and used that along with our stolen customer base to jump start his new venture MobileHop which was designed to cut out the middle guys such as ProxyGuys and sell directly to the end user. This was essentially the end of ProxyGuys
However, the story does not stop there. We asked Bradley if Kiet Chau was offering truly “anonymous” proxy services to end users and what typical clients were actually using the mobile proxies for.
Good question. I can tell you from first hand experience that Kiet Chau is indeed working with law enforcement and has logging more information than he will ever publicly admit. We’ve had numerous chats & conversations in the past (which I have records of through Skype) where Kiet would tell us that law enforcement needs specific records on a particular user and claiming that they were actively monitoring the usage, essentially they had tapped the proxy server and were monitoring the usage & traffic logs. We were given 2 hours to send over all the customer signup details that we had or risk having some kind of unknown “issue” that was never really spelled out. We complied because we had no choice however for customers paying with BitCoin we really had nothing other than a signup email and IP address which was often, a proxy IP.
– Bradley Roekle
While I dont recall the exact verbage he used he said that he had some “contacts” in law enforcement whom he made regular “cash donations” to that helped him fly under the radar for as long as he has, however this has never been confirmed and I assume he was simply trying to blow hot smoke up our rear to keep us on edge and to discourage us from attempting to start our own proxy network.
That’s the story we got from a (former) reseller of Kiet Chau // Vivid-Hosting // MobileHop. Stay tuned as we expose more of what MobileHop // Vivid-Hosting is actually doing to provide the 4G/5G mobile proxy services. We have some insider photos & evidence I’m sure you will love to review.