Windscribe Trolls Mullvad's Donation Scandal With a Parody Scandal of Its Own

Mullvad spent early July dealing with a real PR crisis. Windscribe spent it making jokes about corgis. On July 1, days after news broke that a Mullvad co-founder had personally donated roughly $500,000 to a controversial Swedish party, Windscribe posted a mock “confession” on X about its own CEO’s finances. It was silly, it was well-timed, and it did more for Windscribe’s brand in one afternoon than most VPN companies manage in a quarter.

If you want the full story on what actually happened at Mullvad and whether it should change your subscription, we covered that in our original breakdown of the donation. This piece is about the reaction, and about what a joke tweet says about how VPN companies fight for trust when their technical specs all start to look the same.

What Mullvad was dealing with

Quick recap for context. Daniel Berntsson, co-founder and co-owner of Mullvad, gave 5 million Swedish kronor of his own money to Örebropartiet, a populist party known for hardline “remigration” positions. Mullvad confirmed the money never touched company accounts and stated the donation “is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission.” It also offered refunds to any user who wanted to cancel over the disclosure. The privacy crowd that makes up Mullvad’s core audience did not take it lightly, and the story spread fast through the same forums where Mullvad usually gets praised, not picked apart.

What Windscribe actually posted

Windscribe saw an opening and took it. The company published a statement on X titled “A Statement From Windscribe About Our CEO’s Personal Donations,” framed as if it were getting ahead of a scandal of its own. It argued that criticizing Berntsson without disclosing its own CEO’s giving would be hypocritical, then revealed the shocking truth: CEO Yegor Sak, owner of a corgi named Snoop, had donated to Save Our Scruff, a Toronto dog rescue.

Windscribe did not stop there. Worried that a pro-dog stance alone might “cause division within our userbase,” the statement pivoted to announce a matching donation to Annex Cat Rescue, a Toronto cat charity, “to support their work.” The post closed by mimicking corporate crisis language almost line for line: an apology for a “lack of transparency,” followed by reassurance that “our service and applications are not affected by these donations. They remain secure and dedicated to providing our users with the best VPN on the market.”

It is a tight parody. Every beat mirrors the standard PR playbook Mullvad and plenty of other companies have used in real crises: the deflection, the personal-versus-corporate distinction, the closing reassurance that the product itself is untouched.

Why it landed with the privacy crowd

The joke worked because it did not punch down. Windscribe was not mocking the seriousness of political donations or dismissing why people were upset with Mullvad. It was mocking the format of the corporate apology, the exact genre of statement that companies (including Windscribe, someday) will eventually have to write for real. That self-aware angle is why it traveled well through r/VPN and r/privacy, the same communities where VPN News stories tend to catch fire fast: readers there are quick to reward a company that treats them like adults instead of issuing a bland non-statement.

It also worked because Windscribe rarely inserts itself into rival controversies. Most VPN marketing teams stay quiet during a competitor’s bad week, on the theory that any mention keeps the story alive. Windscribe bet that a sharp, funny take would read as confidence rather than opportunism, and for a big chunk of the privacy audience, it did.

The bigger point: brand trust is the real battleground now

Here is the part that matters past the punchline. Nearly every serious VPN provider today can point to an independent audit and a no-logs claim. Our own scoring reflects how close the technical stories have become: Mullvad still leads on the fundamentals, sitting at 4.04/5 overall with a Cure53-audited no-logs policy, even after the worst week of press it has had in years. Windscribe trails at 3.82/5, and Windscribe itself has no formal third-party audit behind its own no-logs claim, something we cover in our full look at whether Windscribe keeps logs. Mocking someone else’s transparency problem is a lot easier than fixing your own.

That gap between “audited on paper” and “trusted in practice” is exactly where stories like this one live. Encryption standards and jurisdiction disclosures do not change how people feel about a brand day to day. A well-timed joke, a founder’s political donation, a company’s tone in a crisis, these are the things that actually move users between services, because they are the things people can understand without reading a whitepaper. VPN buyers increasingly pick based on vibes as much as specs, and both Mullvad’s stumble and Windscribe’s response are proof of that.

Want to compare all VPNs side by side? Check our full VPN comparison table with scores across 18 criteria.

None of this changes the technical picture for Mullvad users. The no-logs architecture, the numbered accounts, the cash payment option, all of it is exactly as it was before Berntsson’s donation made headlines. What changed is harder to put a number on: a chunk of Mullvad’s audience now associates the brand with a story it never wanted attached to its name, and a rival used that moment to look sharper and more self-aware by comparison.