VPN & Proxy Detection — how streaming services see you

The same signals a streaming service or bank uses to decide you are on a VPN: network class, datacenter association, proxy headers, and locale contradictions, scored side by side.

You are connecting from a datacenter, not a home network

This address belongs to a cloud or hosting provider. That is normal for a VPN, a proxy, a cloud desktop or a server, but it is the single strongest signal sites use to apply extra verification.

Reverse DNS scope

AS16509

Network operator

Anthropic, PBC

Approx. location

🇺🇸 Columbus, OH, United States

Time zone

America/New_York

Postal code

43215

Cloudflare edge

CMH

IP version

IPv4

HTTP protocol

HTTP/2

TLS version

TLSv1.3

TLS cipher

AEAD-AES256-GCM-SHA384

TCP handshake

1 ms

EU jurisdiction

Locale and geolocation agreement running

Comparing browser time zone and languages against network location...

WebRTC candidate exposure running

Checking whether WebRTC bypasses your tunnel...

Edge latency running

Measuring round trip to the nearest Cloudflare edge...

Passive proxy indicators in this request

X-Forwarded-For	absent — no proxy chain declared
Via	absent — no intermediary declared itself
X-Forwarded-Proto	https
Network class	Datacenter / cloud host
Residential ISP match	not in the US residential table
TCP handshake	1 ms

No commercial IP-reputation feed is used here, and no score is invented. Detection is based on the autonomous system your traffic is announced from, checked against a curated table of 243 hosting and 54 VPN-associated networks, plus the request-level proxy headers above and the locale contradictions measured in your browser. Those four things are, in practice, most of what a real anti-fraud system starts from.

Frequently asked

My VPN is on but this says residential. Is that good?

It means the exit address is announced from a network we classify as consumer ISP space, which is exactly what residential-IP VPN tiers pay for. Sites are far less likely to challenge it.

It says datacenter even though I am not using a VPN.

You may be on a corporate network that backhauls traffic through cloud infrastructure, a cloud desktop, or an ISP that announces some consumer ranges from a hosting ASN. Check the network operator field above.

Why does my locale mismatch matter more than my IP?

An IP address can be bought. A browser reporting Europe/London while its address geolocates to Ohio is a contradiction the user did not intend, and it is cheap for a site to check. It is the most common reason a working VPN still fails to unblock a streaming catalogue.