VPN service Hola resells bandwidth of users to third parties that can use the bandwidth for anything they want. This was discovered after website 8Chan was DDOSed by a botnet of Hola users.
The founder of the Hola service, which is popular as Chrome and Firefox extension confirms that it sells the bandwidth of it users as exit nodes for a VPN service. Although Hola states to have always been open about it, Hola recently changed the text on their website about it. The company's FAQ showed a different answer on the question, "Is Hola Free" on the 27th of March than now.
The old text states that Hola uses devices of other users as peers, but the new text makes that more clear and also states that users make "idle resources" available to the Hola network. Hola sells the bandwidth through the website Luminati.io which claims to have the largest group of VPN users in the world.
Meanwhile the Hola FAQ also mentions the Luminati site as well. By using devices of users as exit-nodes, users can unwillingly tunnel illegal activities with the device on which they use Hola, such as being part of criminal transactions or being used as bot in a DDOS or spam botnet.
Hola can be used to e.g. circumvent geo blocks and blocked websites, the browser extensions make it easy to switch to an IP (VPN) in another country.
