Freedur terminated... from the inside?

UPDATE (03/2010): Since the publishing of this post, several things have happened, so if you came across this article from somewhere else, check out all our freedur coverage to find the most recent info.

Woah, we guess this is a risk you take with any internet start up, but who knew our new favorite VPN would flame out this fast? Less than a month after we interviewed the team behind Freedur, it seems that it's been shut down. And before you get your hackles raised about China and its net police again, this time, it seems like it was an inside job.

Currently on the Freedur site is a rant against one of its employees, Chris Mathews:

Just a week ago Chris Mathews sabotaged the service by redirecting www.freedur.com domain to his personal server and stole our customers database and web site scripts. Becasue Chris worked as accountant for us, he bought domain freedur.com for us, thus it was easy for him to sabotage the service. We have intervened and threatened to him with law suits, thus he restored domain back. We had full trust to Chris, we were considering him as a friend, but today we see who is Chris Mathews, an evil and greedy person trying to steal from and screw up his friends, business partners and customers.

Chris Mathews organized an attack to our servers today and destroyed our customers database and web site in an attempt to take over Freedur and run it by himself on his private servers. You can see his attempt to setup Freedur from stolen scripts and database on his server here - http://alnany.com/freedur2/ With help of his friends - Vincent Shen, a Chinese living in Shanghai, and Rick Olson, an American living in
California, Chris is attempting to reverse engineer our Freedur application and use it on his web site.

So, Freedur says, Chris ran off with all the money they earned the past three months and destroyed their database. They say that if you subscribed after August 5, the last date they have customer records for, then they will provide you with service until your subscription ends.

Anyone who subscribed before August 5 will have to take it up with Chris himself. In a fashion remarkably similar to Chinese netizens, they provided all his most recent info and a not so flattering picture. Yikes. We've asked Chris for his side of the story, so we'll see what else can be said about this if and when he responds.

For everyone who enjoyed the service though, Freedur swears it's not quite out for the count. In fact, it hopes to be back in a couple hours. Since we were actually big fans of its service, we hope so too.