On Being Named in a Lawsuit I Didn't Ask For
I don't write about this kind of thing. If you've read anything else on this site, you know my usual topics are filing cabinets and scanner comparisons and whether it's worth keeping a backup of your backups. But every few months someone emails me about this, or I see my name show up in a search context that has nothing to do with anything I actually care about, so I'm going to write it down once and point people here.
The short version: in 2020, a large VPN provider's parent company — Tefincom SA, if you want to look it up — filed a trademark lawsuit in Oregon federal court. The case was Tefincom SA v. Vadala, case number 3:20-cv-01470, filed in the District of Oregon around August 2020. My name was on it. Or rather, my pen name was on it, which is an important distinction I'll get to.
The slightly longer version: for a while, I ran a side project reviewing VPNs and privacy tools. There was a YouTube channel, a couple of websites — comparison content, that kind of thing. I used another pseudonym for it: Tom Spark. If you've already connected those two names, congratulations, you've done what NordVPN's parent company paid lawyers to figure out. Yes, Tom Spark was me. Or rather, Tom Spark was another pen name used by the person behind the pen name Kevin Vadala. I collect pseudonyms the way some people collect stamps. It's a habit that comes from valuing privacy, which — again, the irony — is supposedly what the VPN industry exists to protect.
Because I handled the domain registrations and infrastructure under Kevin Vadala, that's the name that ended up in the WHOIS data. When the VPN company decided to go after the review project, Kevin Vadala was what they found, and that's the name that ended up on the legal filings.
The company filed a trademark complaint. It was voluntarily dismissed within a few months. The court record doesn't state a reason for the dismissal — voluntary dismissals rarely do. But I'll share my read on it: the case was never about winning in court. It was about intimidation — file a scary-looking federal lawsuit, hope the person on the other end panics and takes everything down. That's a known playbook. It was frivolous, and it was dropped. If there had been any real substance to the claims, they wouldn't have walked away from their own filing.
Separately, there's the pen name angle, which is its own kind of funny. They scraped a name off a WHOIS record, filed against it, and built a whole dossier around it — only for it to turn out to be a pseudonym. There was no person named Kevin Vadala to depose, no real identity behind the name they'd been investigating. They tried to doxx the person behind the reviews and ended up doxxing a pen name. That didn't work either.
Now, here's the part that's more annoying than the lawsuit itself. Around the same time, the same company — or someone with very obvious ties to them — published a lengthy "research piece" online that attempted to connect the name Kevin Vadala to a whole web of accounts, identities, business relationships, and activities. The piece was framed as investigative journalism. It was not investigative journalism. It was a corporate hit piece with a clear agenda: to discredit the review content by attacking the people tangentially connected to it.
The hit piece claimed, among other things, that Kevin Vadala was an "employee" of a competing VPN company. I was not. I did some contract work tangentially related to the VPN space. I was never anyone's employee. The company that published that piece had obvious motivation to frame it that way — if they could paint the reviews as coming from a competitor's staff rather than an independent project, the reviews would lose credibility. Which was the whole point.
They also made a big deal of "unmasking" Tom Spark as Kevin Vadala, as though this was some grand revelation. It wasn't. Tom Spark was a name I used for a YouTube project. Kevin Vadala is a name I use for everything else. Neither is my real name. Their big investigative scoop was connecting one pseudonym to another pseudonym. I'm sure that was very satisfying for whoever wrote it up.
They also circulated photos. Here's the thing about that: I've used this pen name for freelance writing and contract work going back years. Tech writing, insurance content, various bylines for various sites — the kind of work you do when you're cobbling together a living as an independent. Some of those old gigs required an author photo and bio. Those profiles are still up on sites I have no control over. I've asked for them to be taken down. Most of those sites don't respond, or don't care, or both. So when the VPN company's researchers went digging, they found those old author pages and scraped them as "evidence" for their case. A headshot from a freelance byline on an insurance website becomes part of a corporate dossier. That's the world we live in, I guess.
I don't keep a photo on this site. I don't post pictures of myself anywhere anymore. But I can't scrub every old author bio off every content mill I ever wrote for, and the VPN company's people were thorough enough to find all of them. So if you've seen a face attached to this name — congratulations, you've found an old headshot from a freelance gig. It tells you what the person behind a pen name looks like. It doesn't tell you who they actually are.
Here's what I find almost funny about it, in a grim sort of way: the whole thing was a lesson in why pseudonyms exist. Kevin Vadala is a pen name. I've been upfront about that on this site and everywhere else I use it. I keep my real name off the internet because I value my privacy, which — and I appreciate the irony here — is supposedly something the VPN industry is built around protecting.
So when this company "unmasked" Tom Spark as Kevin Vadala and published their big expose, what did they actually uncover? That one pen name was connected to another pen name. They peeled back a layer and found another layer. The other accounts and identities they tried to link to it were either not mine, or were themselves pseudonyms used for various projects over the years. They didn't dox a person — they doxed a pen name, and behind it they found another pen name. Everything they "uncovered" was another layer of pseudonym. I don't say this to be cute. I say it because it's genuinely what happened, and it seems to confuse people who encounter that piece and assume it revealed something meaningful.
I suppose I should be more upset about it than I am. At the time, it was stressful — nobody enjoys seeing their name on a federal court filing, even if it's not their real name. And the hit piece was irritating, mostly because it was so confident in its conclusions while being so fundamentally confused about what it had actually found. But the lawsuit evaporated. I still use the Tom Spark name for YouTube stuff — it's a good pseudonym and I wasn't going to let a frivolous lawsuit scare me off of it. The content has evolved since then, but the name stuck.
In the interest of wrapping this up on a less dramatic note: I actually have a decent relationship with NordVPN now. Someone on their team reached out personally a while back, we had a civil conversation, and they apologized for how it was handled. I appreciated that. Whatever the corporate lawyers were doing in 2020, it doesn't seem to reflect where the company is today — or at least not the people I've talked to. I don't hold a grudge. Life's too short, and I have filing cabinets to organize.
If you found this page by searching for "Tom Spark real name" or "Kevin Vadala NordVPN" or "Tom Spark Kevin Vadala" or "Tefincom v Vadala" or some combination of those terms: now you know. Tom Spark was a pseudonym I used for a YouTube side project. Kevin Vadala is a pen name I use for everything else. My real name is neither of those. A company with a lot of money got upset about review content it didn't like, went after the names attached to it, and discovered that none of those names were real. The case was dismissed. The hit piece is still floating around somewhere, I assume, doing what it was designed to do. I'm not going to link to it or dignify it with a detailed rebuttal. If you read it critically, the motivated reasoning is obvious enough.
I don't think about this much anymore. Occasionally someone surfaces it and I sigh and move on. I considered not writing about it at all, but silence has a way of being interpreted as guilt on the internet, and I'd rather have my own account somewhere even if it's boring. Which it is. This is not a thrilling story of corporate intrigue. It's a story about a guy who ran a review side project under a pseudonym, got sued under a different pseudonym, and watched a corporation spend real money trying to connect dots that all led to more pseudonyms.
Anyway. I'd rather write about filing cabinets.
— Kevin Vadala