Proxy & VPN Detection Test

For commercial VPN services — yes, with extremely high confidence. Every major VPN provider owns specific IP ranges that are catalogued in commercial IP intelligence databases. Your IP's ASN (Autonomous System Number) identifies the owner, and companies like Mullvad, NordVPN, and ExpressVPN are explicitly classified as "hosting" or "VPN" rather than residential ISPs. The only approaches that consistently evade detection are residential proxies (which use real home ISP IP ranges) and carefully configured self-hosted VPNs on residential IP addresses.

An ASN (Autonomous System Number) is a unique identifier assigned to each network operator by regional internet registries (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC). Every IP address belongs to exactly one ASN, and every ASN has a registered owner — either an ISP serving residential customers, a company, or a hosting/datacenter provider. VPN companies own ASNs that are publicly listed under their company names. When your IP belongs to ASN 39351 (Mullvad) or ASN 9009 (M247 Ltd — used by NordVPN), any website can query a free WHOIS API and identify the VPN provider by name in under 50 milliseconds.

The anonymity score is a composite of 8 weighted signals — ASN type (highest weight), blacklist membership, rDNS hostname pattern, IP classification (datacenter/residential/mobile), HTTP proxy headers, timezone mismatch, geolocation vs locale mismatch, and Tor exit node status. A score of 90–100 means no detectable signals. A score below 50 means your connection type is detectable by any basic IP intelligence check. The score does not measure the strength of your VPN's encryption — it measures how identifiable your connection type is to web services.

Standard VPN providers operate servers in datacenters and own IP ranges registered under their company names. Residential proxies work differently — they route your traffic through real home internet connections owned by regular ISP customers, typically via a software agent installed on those users' devices in exchange for payment or a free service. Because the exit IP belongs to a real residential ASN (Comcast, BT, Deutsche Telekom, etc.), it passes the ASN type check, the IP classification check, and the blacklist check. The timezone and locale checks are the most likely remaining signals to expose residential proxy use.

Yes — but only if the VPN or proxy is misconfigured. A correctly configured VPN or proxy strips or replaces forwarding headers before passing your request to the destination server. However, some cheap proxy services and poorly configured VPN configurations forward the original client IP in X-Forwarded-For, X-Real-IP, or Via headers — completely undermining the anonymity. This tool checks whether any such headers are reaching our server with your real IP embedded. If they are, your "VPN" is exposing your real address to every website you visit.

No IP addresses are logged or stored by PrivacyTestLab. The detection test queries third-party APIs (ipinfo.io, Spamhaus, AbuseIPDB, Tor Project exit list) using your IP, but we do not retain any results on our servers. All results are processed in your browser and discarded when you close the page. The third-party API providers have their own privacy policies — this is unavoidable for real-time IP intelligence lookups, but we use privacy-respecting providers and query only what is necessary for the test.