Topic starter
15/08/2026 6:12 pm
TL;DR: VPNs now account for 15.3% of observed sessions, up nearly 40% year over year, according to Fingerprint’s 2024 Device Intelligence Report, showing how anonymized traffic is eroding the reliability of IP, location, and device signals in fraud decisioning. The governance problem is no longer whether to detect VPNs, but how to separate legitimate privacy from misuse without amplifying false positives.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Fingerprint: “The 10 best VPN detection tools for fraud prevention in 2025”.
By the numbers:
- 15.3% of observed sessions originated from a VPN connection, according to Fingerprint’s 2024 Device Intelligence Report cited by Fingerprint.
- VPN connections were up nearly 40% from the previous year, according to Fingerprint’s 2024 Device Intelligence Report cited by Fingerprint.
Key questions
Q: How should fraud teams handle VPN traffic without creating false positives?
A: Treat VPN detection as one signal inside a broader decision model, not as a standalone verdict.
Q: Why do VPNs create problems for fraud prevention and identity verification?
A: VPNs hide the user’s apparent origin, which weakens geolocation, IP reputation, and device correlation.
Q: What breaks when fraud controls rely mainly on IP reputation?
A: Fraud controls break when they assume network location is a reliable proxy for trust.
Practitioner guidance
- Build context-rich VPN decisioning Combine VPN status with device continuity, session history, ASN, and behavioural signals so one masked connection does not automatically trigger the same outcome for every user.
- Separate privacy use from fraud patterns Write fraud rules that distinguish remote employees, travelling customers, and privacy tools from high-risk masking behaviours such as rapid account creation or repeated geolocation drift.
- Feed anonymizer signals into model scoring Use VPN, proxy, and Tor indicators as inputs to fraud scoring and review queues rather than as standalone deny-list conditions.
Bottom line: VPN detection matters because anonymized traffic has made IP, location, and device signals less reliable for fraud verification.
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15/08/2026 6:19 pm
VPN detection is now a trust-governance problem, not just a network-control problem. Fraud teams are being forced to decide how much identity confidence can be inferred from a connection that may be privacy-preserving, corporate, or malicious. That changes the control objective from simple blocking to risk interpretation, which is exactly where identity and fraud governance overlap. Practitioners should treat masked-traffic handling as a verification policy decision, not a perimeter filter.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should compliance teams do when VPNs hide prohibited jurisdictions?
A: They should define escalation rules for sessions that cannot prove location with sufficient confidence, especially in regulated markets such as fintech, iGaming, and crypto. A masked connection should trigger a jurisdiction review path when transaction eligibility depends on where the user is actually located.
👉 Read our full editorial: VPN detection is becoming central to fraud verification