What is VPN detection?
VPN detection is the process of determining whether an IP address belongs to a VPN, proxy, or anonymizing service rather than a real residential or mobile connection. It combines IP reputation lists, ASN classification, and active network probing to produce a verdict, used for fraud prevention and geo-compliance.
The honest measure of a VPN detector is its false-positive rate — how often it wrongly flags a legitimate residential user — because that error blocks real customers. A detector that flags everything scores a perfect true-positive rate while being useless.
Modern detection layers ground-truth provider lists, datacenter ASN classification, threat-intel feeds, and active protocol probing, then returns a graded verdict rather than a single boolean.
How IPLogs handles it
IPLogs runs a seven-layer pipeline and publishes a 0.3% false-positive rate on a Team Cymru-validated corpus, returning the exact signals behind every verdict.
See the accuracy benchmark