V Shred Scandal: Data Leak Exposes PII, Controversy Explained

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V Shred Scandal

Know about ‘V Shred Scandal’ Internet scams are notoriously unstable; the V Shred Scandal involves a fitness company that is accused of fraud and has gained popularity due to a data leak.

A well-known fitness business with a focus on diets, short workouts, and supplements is called V Shred.

The business states that it has clients in 119 countries, receives 12 million unique visitors every month to its website, and has more than 40,000 university students enrolled.

The research team at vpnMentor, led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, made public the data leak involving a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket in 2022, which exposed the personal information of at least 99,000 people.

V Shred responded to the research team via Amazon customer service on June 1. During communication between the Company and researchers, a V Shred team member denied a concern with the exposure of PII.

 

V Shred Scandal: Is It A Scam?

Customers of V Shred who have previously attacked the company are now collectively creating “Stop V Shred” videos.

Following reports of the improperly configured bucket to V Shred and AWS on May 18 and May 20, respectively, V Shred became the owner of the Company materials maintained in the bucket.

V Shred Scandal
Customers of V shred who have already criticized VShred in the past are suddenly making “Stop VShred” videos unison.(Source: Melmagazine)

The bucket originally included 1.3 million files totaling 606GB of data, which consumers discovered on May 14. There were three files altogether. CSV files that appeared to be lead generation lists, client email lists, and trainer lists were particularly crucial.

Several media reports V Shred, a marketing firm with hundreds of employees, distributes “weight reduction pills” and other “supplements” that make outrageous and unfounded claims, and it purposely targets beginners who don’t know any better.

The massive. The CSV file containing the PII of tens of thousands of V Shred customers was 180MB in size.

All of the customers’ information, including names, home addresses, email addresses, dates of birth, some Social Security numbers, usernames and passwords for social media accounts, age ranges, genders, and citizenship status, was contained in the files, which also included information about each customer’s ethnicity.

 

V Shred Controversy Explained: V Shred exposed

According to online publications that are currently popular, VShred has been selling the data of his cherished clients, including sensitive and personal information.

Since at least three years ago, ATHLEAN-X has constantly teased him for instructing bad/dangerous activities and stealing their content.

V Shred Scandal
Consumer reached out to Vin Sant and SCULPTnation for an interview on multiple occasions via the info available on the Contact section of the SCULPTnation website and via his personal account at VShred. (Source: Melmegazine)

One Redditor mentioned how Josh Brett recently released a thorough exposé video on V Shred, inspiring other respectable fitness YouTubers to promote it to their subscribers.

The owner repeatedly added V Shred, at first because they were ripping content from other channels and then because of their bad and probably harmful advice.

Numerous resources, including Company documents, diet manuals, exercise routines, and user images, are still open and available, according to ZDNet’s verification of the open bucket.

 

Why Is V Shred Scandal Trending?

Due to consumer complaints that PII and private images of fitness clients and trainers were disclosed as a result of a data leak, the V Shred controversy is reportedly trending in the media.

By defending the open bucket’s public status, the fitness center Company only partially solved the problem.

According to Znet, the fitness company V Shed exposed the personally identifiable information (PII) of over 99,000 customers and trainers and has not yet fully and correctly fixed the database leak.

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