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Comment by jonathantf2 | Hacker News Reader

My dad used to complain that he couldn't get on certain websites, got CAPTCHAs a lot more than he used to and often prices came up in US dollars on his computer, turns out he paid for a 3y plan to NordVPN and had it start on start up on his computer.

He can barely work the Sky box never mind stream stuff from the internet, he got duped into thinking it would make him "safer" when in reality it just makes using the internet a lot harder as everyone flags your traffic as malicious based on the datacentre IP.

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Why is your assumption that VPN traffic is being blocked because it's malicious?

If you read carefully, you may see that they did not say that "VPN traffic is being blocked because it's malicious"

Because it absolutely is.

I occasionally fire up Mullvad when I’m on the go. I get blocked way more often when I use it

Because people run crawlers and perform illegal activity, and/or because ‘security companies’ sell the IP lists as low reputation potentially malicious IPs?

Anyone who has browsed through one of these personal VPN services - or even a DIY VPN from a datacentre IP - for more than about 10 minutes will have experienced the increase in captcha's.

>Anyone who has browsed through one of these personal VPN services - or even a DIY VPN from a datacentre IP - for more than about 10 minutes will have experienced the increase in captcha's.

So has anyone behind random CGNAT.

It's the same with any broker service. Fire up a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel for the same effect.

Because I've hosted websites where blocking datacentre IPs has caused a massive reduction in spam and malicious activity - and tried to use Google search with Mullvad dialled only to be greeted by a CAPTCHA every other search.

As someone who operated a high fraud target during the pandemic, I am comfortable asserting that while not all commercial VPN traffic is fraudulent or malicious, most fraudulent or malicious traffic is over VPN.

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