3w ago

Recommend a VPN with residential exit IPs

Some friends have safety concerns that mean they need to appear digitally as if they're inside the USA while being elsewhere physically. Standard commercial VPNs are easy to detect (else I'd recommend Mullvad), so they need an option that looks like a residential connection.

They could potentially DIY it by leaving a VPN server at a relative's house, but I'm asking here for subscription services. It's best if they have a Mac OS app that's foolproof, with a clear visual indication that it's in use, and a feature to block traffic if the VPN is disconnected.

tl;dr: what's the closest residential VPN to Mullvad?

30 comments

I don’t think you’ll be able to find a commercial VPN service using residential IPs, let alone a trustworthy one.
- There are commercial ones — but they sell to businesses, not individuals. And whether they’re trustworthy is open to discussion.
  
  I've heard of them in the context of screwing over people who want an easy income: they're promised some pennies for their connection being used, then find themselves banned from Netflix and Spotify for "being on a VPN".
  Also, isn't this where scrapers come from? Edit: just a short while after writing this, saw the news about FOSS projects being DDOSed by AI scrapers from Amazon and such. Yes, they are indeed using such residential IPs.
- There are many, some of which are easily found with a web search for "residential VPN". That also comes up with a bunch of untrustworthy listicles with affiliate links to the "best" options.
  Some of these are extremely shady, using malware to turn unsuspecting victims into exit nodes. Some gain access with consent by offering payment or some other benefit; this probably violates ISP TOS, but I don't care about that.

any VPN that does this is running over a botnet, and probably can’t be trusted.

I know it's not what you're asking for, but the GL.iNet routers are popular amongst remote workers that decide to travel without their companie's knowledge. They use two of those routers (I think?), one at home and one they take with them so the ip address always looks like their home address to their employers, and they can still connect to their employer's VPN on top.
- This is accurate but you don’t need a GL.iNet router to act as the VPN server at home, you just need any device that can act as the server at home.
  
  Agreed
- Yes, this is the DIY VPN server at a relative's house option.

There won't be any commercial VPNs that won't have a commercial IP.
You might look around for a community-hosted VPN.

I think the best way to do this is to find an ISP that offers VPS in the same network block(s) as their residential subscribers. I too am in the market for something like this and not sure where to look.

Not sure if this is exactly what you had in mind, but I have one of these devices and it does what it says, albeit a tad slowly and you’re counting on the exit node owner to not be a POS if the man comes knockin.
https://www.deeper.network/
I suppose if adoption of this became bigger, it’d become faster. In any case, it’s easy to setup and the hardware is easily portable. I use it as I travel for work and occasionally come across a hotel that’s blocking the usual suspect vpn services.
- This is similar to what I had in mind. I was thinking of software and a paid subscription while this is a hardware device with free access. It does appear to reward people for acting as exit nodes in a more or less ethical manner (depending on how you feel about weird cryptocurrencies).
  
  Since I so seldom use it, I don’t turm on the exit node from my hotel. Maybe would be diferently if i used it at home. Though I’m not entirely sure I’d be ok letting random traffic pass through me. I know, the hypocrisy runs thick. 🤪
  But it’s a retty good idea. I think the crypto is a good reward, but also screams scam to others.

So this isn't a VPN service, but having read your comments it might work...
When I was in Sweden recently I needed to do something online with the appearance that I was in the US. First I tried using a couple of VPN services but they were detected by the website I was trying to use and I got an "access denied" message. So my travel partner activated their Verizon TravelPass and let me hotspot off it. TravelPass gave us a regular Verizon wireless address out of California and I was able to complete my task. Unfortunately though it's $12/day.
- Travel esim could do it but a lot cheaper

If safety is involved you want Tor. No VPN is good enough to protect life. You want a hardened Tor browser with the proper obscurity options turned on so it looks like regular traffic. Also turn off JavaScript by setting the security settings to max.
I would use a snowflake since those are run by individuals
- This is a concern about a remote employer detecting that they're working from outside the USA, not surveillance. TOR is not an appropriate solution.
  
  They are going to find out regardless. Stop trying to cheat the system as that's crazy in so many ways.
- Not the first time I've read that, and I don't doubt it, but why is Tor better? Is it because the VPNN is a single point of failure?
  Let's say someone uses a strongly secured and sandboxed browser alongside a trustworthy VPN, what specifically would make Tor better?
  
  TOR is designed to resist surveillance and censorship by ISPs or national governments. Communications are encrypted in transit, and there's no way for a node to tell whether it's talking to another relay node or the end user.
  It's fairly easy for a website to detect that a user is accessing it via TOR; there are lists of exit nodes like this one which a firewall or intrusion detection system can update programmatically. Many websites block or limit access via TOR using such lists, making it unsuitable for use cases such as the one I'm discussing.
  
  The Tor browser is designed to appear identical to web sites so it is harder to fingerprint. Combine that with the three hop routing and it is very hard to pin point a user. Tor also has strong anticensorship tools that can be activated with a single click. It also has Onion sites which are extremely hard to track and do not pass over the clearnet.
  VPNs are not and have never been particularly useful from a privacy perspective. You would need to trust the VPN provider which is faulty due to the fact that you have no way of knowing what the VPN provider is doing. Also your traffic still passes over the internet after it leaves the VPN provider so there still are ISPs involved. VPNs are really useful for changing your IP address and bypassing censorship. There is no other use case despite all the marketing.
  The real way to get better privacy on the internet is to use https only and to setup encrypted DNS.

Best options are either a personal VPN service with a VPS provider. It won't look residential but it won't be flagged as a VPN.
For truly resential you have only two options.
the easy option is to ask a friend to setup tailscale on a computer at home and have it be your exit node
the other option is to look for a small and local VPS provider, while they don't look 100% residential, some of them do look residential enough that outside of manual inspections they look residential.

I at least don't know about a VPN provider offering this which is at the same time trustworthy. Instead, they could kind of DIY it by using for example tailscale. Tailscale would allow for using a device as an exit gate. They'd need a device at a friend's home that is online when they need it but that's it. An old phone or a cheap raspberry pi would suffice. Wouldn't even cost a penny (except for the exit gate device)

30 comments