Your internet protocol address (simply called “IP address”) tells every website you visit, every online service you use, and every person you chat with where you are — at least in theory. In practice, it’s easy to fake your IP address and change your virtual location to almost anywhere.
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A fake IP address is an IP address shown to websites, services, or other internet users that is different from the one you’ve been assigned by your internet service provider (ISP). With a fake IP address, you’re hiding your actual virtual location from the party at the other end of the line.
Despite the name, a fake IP address is not “fake” at all — it’s a real IP address belonging to a VPN server, web proxy, or some other IP changing tool. After all, you can’t establish a connection without a valid IP address on both ends. But a fake IP address gives others misleading information about you, making it harder to pinpoint or profile you.
A word of caution — don’t confuse “using a fake IP address” with IP spoofing. The first is a legitimate practice used by millions around the world, while the latter is a dangerous cyberattack that attempts to bypass network security by changing the IP address of data packets.
You don’t normally use the word “fake” to describe anything good, but the benefits of using a fake IP address are very real. Hiding your IP address can make your digital life better in many ways, like:
The biggest benefit of using a fake IP address is also its greatest weakness — you change your virtual location, which means websites and services from home no longer recognize you as one of their own. This can lead to frustrating games of peek-a-boo with your fake IP address whenever you switch between content abroad and content from your home country.
There are online tools to help alleviate this pain, however. For example, a top-tier virtual private network (VPN) like NordVPN may feature split tunneling, letting you specify which apps use a fake IP address. Thanks to split tunneling, you can safely access content from different regions at the same time while traveling.
The other danger of fake IP addresses is tied to their accessibility — if you can safely set up a fake IP address, anyone can. It can be difficult to verify whether someone is really based where they claim they are. That’s not a knock against using a fake IP address, however — if anything, hiding your own IP helps protect you against potential scammers and hackers.
There are multiple tools for faking your IP address, some safer than others. Let’s have a look at the most popular ones and see what they have to offer.
No — with the exception of Tor, using free fake IP address generators is very risky. Despite their name, “free” fake IP address generators (such as free VPNs) can be very costly to run 24/7. Their administrators may restrict bandwidth, forego updates, or limit maintenance to cut down costs — or even sell the data of their users to third parties for profit.
Even the Tor network isn’t completely safe. Tor nodes are run by unvetted volunteers, which means snoops and criminals can set up their own nodes to capture data as it exits the network. Make sure to keep these dangers and the aforementioned fake IP limitations in mind when deciding between using Tor or a VPN.
No, you cannot manually create a fake IP address — in fact, you cannot create an IP address, period, without assistance from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). The IANA uses a complex algorithm to produce valid IP addresses and allocates them to ISPs and other local internet registries.
You might have come across something called a random IP address generator (sometimes called just a random IP generator) while searching the web. Don’t get too excited — these are simply tools that generate random IP addresses for testing purposes. These random IPs are just strings of data that don’t lead anywhere.
Remember — when we talk about fake IP addresses, we’re actually talking about the practice of hiding one valid IP address behind another. You can control the location of your fake IP address (for example, by choosing a VPN server in that country), but you can’t generate one out of thin air.
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