We should have seen this coming.
That online scammers are now attempting to piggyback on the confusion caused by the Donald Trump and the Republican Party's wholesale selling out of your online privacy shouldn't be too surprising: in the days after Congress passed the legislation, numerous outlets, including Motherboard, published guides on how to select and properly configure a VPN to minimize the risk of your private data being sold to the highest bidder (even if they can sometimes be difficult to use).
Satnam Narang, the Norton by Symantec security response manager, told me that "users should be skeptical on social media and via email of scammers looking to capitalize on their interest in VPNs." For a list of VPNs trusted by Motherboard, you can check out our guide here.
Motherboard's guide is right here. Lots of sites are SEOing the shit out of VPN guide pages (good luck), so I encourage you to find a few trusted sources to guide your usage decisions. Just keep in mind that if you choose to use a VPN, the company that provides it to you can see your browsing data and other Internet activity that you're obfuscating from ISPs. FYI.
It'll be illuminating to see how the VPN business fares over the next year, as using one is still a mostly confusing series of steps and setups for most consumers to navigate. And at the end of the day, will it be worth it? Which data will be sold by ISPs, and to whom, exactly? Curious not a peep has been made about this from advertisers or ISPs (probably because selling this data for direct response TV has been going on for a while now), and no one has really noticed or cared up until this point.