The Silent Gap
On a June morning in 2025, silence swept across Europe. For hours, the servers of Hetzner — one of the continent’s largest hosting providers — went dark.
For Rent A Cyber Friend, a platform with 2.6 million users, those hours were not mere downtime. They were the erasure of an entire New Human Economy: micro-incomes, streaming in real time from one person’s presence to another, abruptly vanishing into digital static.
For the freelancers, students, and creators who had come to depend on it, the outage was existential. For the founder, Francesco Vitali, it was the nightmare scenario he thought he had already insured against.
The New Human Economy
Rent A Cyber Friend is an infrastructure for human presence as value: a digital marketplace where people can earn real income by mentoring, guiding, or simply being there for others.
In a world racing toward automation, it offers the opposite: the economy of the human. The “gig” here is not driving, not delivery — but presence. Emotional intelligence. Skills in micro-moments. Attention as currency.
This was what went dark in June. And this was why Rent A Cyber Friend had purchased coverage from a startup-friendly insurer that promised to understand exactly these risks.
The Promise of Vouch
The insurer was Vouch. Its brand was built on a mantra: “By founders, for founders.” Its CEO, Sam Hodges, spoke in videos of “trust reinvented.” The message was clear: Vouch wasn’t just selling policies, it was selling solidarity — a covenant that when catastrophe struck, the founders it served would not be alone.
It was a promise that would evaporate faster than the Hetzner servers had crashed.
The Theater of Contradictions
The claim, initially simple, turned into a labyrinth.
It began with Network Adjusters, a firm tasked with evaluating coverage. The file landed with an adjuster whose years of experience were fewer than the startup’s years of existence. She asked for a Statement of Work. It was provided. She requested invoices. They were delivered. Then proof of payment. Submitted again.
Each new demand was met. Each time, the bar shifted.
Soon, attorneys entered: R. Stacy Lane, representing United Specialty Insurance and Vouch, pivoted from requesting PR details to declaring the PR hire itself invalid — despite the adjuster’s earlier approval. “Send SOW” had become “you should never have hired them.”
Then came hourly breakdowns, rejected as “insufficient.” Then a recorded statement, a demand with no basis in the policy language. When Vitali asked where in the contract this was required, the reply was blunt: “You simply must.”
The escalation continued. Sam Hodges, the CEO who once embodied the brand’s founder-first ethos, responded to emails with sympathetic language but disclaimers of authority: “I’ll monitor. I’ll support where I can. But I can’t intervene.”
Next arrived Luis Larios, from Allied Universal Investigations, requesting a recorded video statement “as if it were the most natural step in the world.”
By August, two months into the ordeal, Kelly Wulff, Vouch’s General Counsel, stepped in only to declare that “Vouch has no authority to influence the outcome.” Yet in the same breath, she copied Robert Love, CEO of Hiscox Europe — a contradiction that revealed more entanglement than she admitted.
Finally, the curtain rose on Scott Schechter, from Kaufman Borgeest & Ryan LLP. His letter escalated further: a cease & desist forbidding Vitali from contacting Vouch, Corix, Network Adjusters, or Hiscox, and a formal demand for an Examination Under Oath — a legal tool typically reserved for fraud investigations or large-scale loss disputes. Here, it was deployed over reimbursable PR expenses.
What began with SOWs and invoices had climaxed in threats, silences, and legal theater.
The Strategy of Exhaustion
To anyone versed in insurance law, the pattern was familiar. Delay, deny, defend. Request document after document. Reject what is given. Introduce conditions not in the contract. Exhaust the claimant until they abandon pursuit.
For a solo founder juggling platform stability, user trust, and brand survival, such tactics are not inconvenience — they are suffocation.
What Vouch marketed as “trust reinvented” began to resemble the oldest insurance playbook in the book.
Old Economy vs. New Economy
This conflict was never just about one claim. It was a collision between two eras.
On one side: the Old Economy — legacy insurers, claims adjusters, underwriters, and lawyers, trained in obstruction as strategy. On the other: the New Human Economy — millions of people carving out livelihoods from their presence, their skills, their humanity.
What Rent A Cyber Friend faced in June 2025 was not simply a server outage, but the friction of an old system failing to comprehend, let alone support, a new one.
From Private Claim to Public Forum
Vitali’s response was not silence. He launched ToVouchOrNotToVouch.com — a public archive of every email, request, and contradiction. A repository where other founders could share their own experiences.
The claim file had become a stage. The audience: regulators, press, and the next generation of entrepreneurs asked to trust Vouch with their futures.
To Vouch or Not To Vouch?
In the end, the case leaves a Shakespearean question: To Vouch, or not to Vouch?
Can innovation — fragile, fast, human-centered — rely on legacy institutions that thrive on delay?
Can trust be insured by those who fail to practice it?
And what happens when the economic future of millions rests on contracts written for a past that no longer exists?
The outage of June 2025 was temporary. The silence that followed from Vouch may echo far longer.
For the full record of this case — every email, contradiction, and response — and for updates as the battle unfolds, visit https://tovouchornottovouch.com/.
