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No smoking gun, sure, but some very suspicious traffic patterns. How is NordVPN getting traffic routed through so many different ISPs who generally only serve residential customers?

Hard to imagine that so many ISPs are agreeing to help NordVPN bypass geo-blocking. Pretty certain that there’s some kind of shenanigans going on.

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I don’t have any experience with NordVPN, but off the top of my head, it’s not hard to imagine someone looking at an internet backbone map, doing some math, and just paying for a couple hundred residential broadband packages. (Napkin speculation: maybe 30 major markets, round up to 50. Most markets have only a couple serious residential broadband providers (sadly, in the U.S. the average is below 2), so multiply that by 3 (a big over-estimate, but in some places it’s probably worthwhile to double coverage). Sprinkle the remaining 50 around the smaller markets to make sure you have decent access into all of the major backbone loops. Ballpark it at $50/each and you could blanket the U.S. major population centers for $1k/month.)

The ISP bill is only part of the overall cost, and a small piece of it at that. You also need a physical address for that connection to be installed at, power for equipment, and someone to respond when something inevitably goes wrong (admittedly the person could cover multiple cities potentially).

Years ago, I knew a guy who wanted to do that with devices in used trailers. Managed by locally recruited "fake" residents, working as consultants. Located in trailer parks around the US.

Seemed way too iffy to me.

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