VPN usage has surged in recent years, driven by growing privacy awareness, remote work, and access to geo-restricted content. For e-commerce merchants, this creates a challenge: VPN traffic includes both legitimate customers who value their privacy and fraudsters who use VPNs to hide their identity and location.
Blocking all VPN users would alienate a significant portion of your customer base. Ignoring VPN traffic entirely leaves you exposed to fraud. The answer lies in VPN detection - identifying when a visitor is using a VPN and making informed decisions about how to handle that session.
Why Customers Use VPNs
Understanding why legitimate shoppers use VPNs helps you avoid treating all VPN traffic as suspicious.
Privacy protection - Many consumers use VPNs as a standard part of their internet security, especially on public Wi-Fi networks. They’re not trying to hide from you - they’re protecting themselves from everyone else.
Corporate networks - Employees browsing during breaks or shopping from work laptops are often on company VPNs. This is especially common with the rise of remote work, where corporate VPN usage is a default.
Travelers - Customers traveling internationally may connect through VPNs to access services from their home country or avoid restrictive local networks.
Censorship circumvention - Shoppers in countries with internet censorship may rely on VPNs to access international e-commerce sites at all.
ISP throttling - Some users use VPNs to prevent their internet provider from throttling specific types of traffic.
These are all legitimate use cases, and the customers behind them are real buyers with real intent to purchase.
Why Fraudsters Use VPNs
On the other side of the spectrum, VPNs are a standard tool in the fraudster’s kit.
Location masking - Fraudsters use VPNs to appear as though they’re in the same country as the stolen credit card, bypassing basic geolocation fraud checks.
Bypassing geo-blocks - If your store blocks certain countries due to high fraud rates, VPNs let attackers route around those restrictions.
Identity obfuscation - VPNs hide the attacker’s real IP address, making it harder to track repeated fraud attempts back to a single source.
Credential stuffing at scale - Bots performing credential stuffing attacks rotate through VPN and proxy servers to avoid IP-based rate limiting.
Card testing - Fraudsters testing stolen card numbers use VPNs to distribute their attempts across different IP addresses, making the activity harder to detect.
The challenge is clear: the same technology serves both legitimate privacy needs and criminal activity.
The Difference Between Legitimate and Suspicious VPN Use
While you can’t know a visitor’s intent with certainty, several signals help distinguish between legitimate VPN users and potentially fraudulent ones.
Signals that suggest legitimate use:
- VPN IP is in the same country as the shipping address and billing address
- The visitor browses naturally - viewing multiple products, reading descriptions, spending normal amounts of time on pages
- The account has a history of previous legitimate purchases
- The device fingerprint is consistent with a real consumer device
Signals that suggest suspicious use:
- The VPN IP location doesn’t match the billing or shipping address country
- The visitor goes directly to checkout with minimal browsing
- Multiple failed login attempts from the same VPN exit node
- The session uses a data center IP rather than a consumer VPN provider
- The device fingerprint matches known bot patterns or has been seen in previous fraud attempts
The key is not to make a binary allow/block decision based on VPN usage alone, but to weight it alongside other risk factors.
How VPN Detection Works
VPN detection relies on identifying characteristics that distinguish VPN traffic from regular residential internet connections.
IP Database Lookups
The most common method. Specialized databases maintain lists of IP addresses associated with known VPN providers, data centers, proxies, and Tor exit nodes. When a visitor connects, their IP is checked against these databases.
Strengths: Fast, low overhead, covers major VPN providers. Limitations: New VPN servers may not be catalogued immediately. Residential proxy networks are harder to detect since they use real consumer IP addresses.
Data Center IP Detection
Most VPN servers run in data centers (AWS, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, etc.). Traffic from data center IPs is rarely legitimate consumer traffic. Identifying these IPs is a strong signal of VPN, proxy, or bot usage.
DNS Leak Detection
When a VPN is misconfigured, DNS requests may leak through the user’s actual internet provider rather than the VPN tunnel. Detecting a mismatch between the visitor’s IP location and their DNS server location can reveal VPN usage.
Latency and Routing Analysis
VPN connections add latency and change the network path between the visitor and your server. Analyzing these patterns can help identify VPN usage, though this method is more complex to implement.
WebRTC Leak Detection
Browsers using WebRTC can sometimes expose a visitor’s real IP address even when they’re connected to a VPN. While many modern VPN apps block this leak, it remains a useful detection signal when present.
Implementing VPN Detection on Shopify
Shopify’s platform doesn’t include built-in VPN detection. To add this capability, you need a third-party solution.
What to Look For in a VPN Detection Solution
- Accurate IP classification - The tool should distinguish between consumer VPN services, data center proxies, residential proxies, and Tor exit nodes
- Low false positive rate - Incorrectly flagging legitimate customers as VPN users creates friction and lost sales
- Configurable responses - Rather than a binary block, the tool should let you choose how to handle VPN traffic: allow, challenge, flag for review, or block
- Integration with other security layers - VPN detection is most effective when combined with country blocking, bot detection, and fraud scoring
- Real-time detection - The check should happen before the visitor reaches checkout, not after a purchase is already in progress
SecurEcommerce’s Approach
SecurEcommerce includes VPN and proxy detection as part of its Shopify security suite. When a visitor connects through a VPN, data center, or known proxy network, the system identifies the connection type and applies your configured rules.
You can choose to:
- Allow VPN traffic but flag it for monitoring
- Show a warning or additional verification step to VPN users
- Block specific types of masked traffic (e.g., block data center IPs while allowing consumer VPN services)
- Combine VPN detection with geo-blocking - for example, allow VPN traffic from your target markets but block VPN traffic that appears to originate from sanctioned countries
This flexibility lets you tailor your policy to your specific risk profile rather than applying a one-size-fits-all rule.
Balancing Security with Privacy
Aggressive VPN blocking can backfire. A growing number of consumers use VPNs by default, and blocking them outright means turning away real buyers.
Best practices for balancing security and privacy:
- Don’t block VPN users by default. Use VPN detection as one signal among many, not as an automatic block trigger.
- Apply friction proportionally. A VPN user with a matching billing address and normal browsing behavior should be treated differently from a VPN user attempting rapid-fire login attempts.
- Be transparent. If you do challenge a VPN user, explain why. A brief message like “For your security, we need to verify your identity” is better than an unexplained block page.
- Respect privacy regulations. Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have obligations around how you handle customer data and IP information. Ensure your VPN detection practices comply with GDPR, CCPA, or other applicable regulations.
- Give customers an alternative. If a VPN user is blocked from checkout, provide a way to contact support and complete their purchase through manual verification.
Handling VPN Users at Checkout
Checkout is the highest-stakes moment for fraud detection. Here’s a practical framework for handling VPN users at this critical point.
Low-risk VPN session (matching billing country, normal browsing behavior, known device):
- Allow checkout to proceed normally
- Log the VPN detection for future reference
Medium-risk VPN session (mismatched country, new account, or unusual browsing pattern):
- Present an additional verification step (email confirmation, CAPTCHA, or phone verification)
- Flag the order for manual review before fulfillment
High-risk VPN session (data center IP, rapid checkout attempt, multiple failed card attempts, or known fraud patterns):
- Block the checkout attempt
- Display a message directing the visitor to customer support
- Log the session details for your fraud team
This tiered approach lets you stop the most obvious fraud while minimizing friction for the vast majority of VPN users who are legitimate customers.
Conclusion
VPN detection is not about punishing privacy-conscious customers. It’s about adding a critical layer of context to your fraud prevention strategy. When you know whether a visitor is using a VPN, and what type of VPN it is, you can make smarter decisions about how to handle that session - applying the right level of scrutiny based on the full picture rather than a single data point.
The most effective approach combines VPN detection with country blocking, behavioral analysis, and fraud scoring to create a security system that adapts to risk level. This protects your store from the fraudsters who rely on VPNs to hide while keeping the door open for the legitimate customers who simply value their privacy.