Types of Anonymous IPs and How They Affect Your Business

Anonymous IP addresses (sometimes incorrectly generalized as “proxies”) serve to hide a web user’s true IP address and obfuscate their geolocation. There are legitimate reasons, usually related to privacy or security, to use anonymous IPs, but many businesses find that fraudsters and other bad actors also use anonymous IPs in malicious ways that affect the bottom line. E-commerce For businesses selling goods and services online, IP geolocation checks are a fairly easy control to implement. These checks help identify bad orders based on suspicious patterns in the IP location of the transacting user, the billing address, and the shipping address (if applicable). Because of the prevalence of these checks, fraudsters with stolen credit cards use anonymous IPs to spoof locations close to the billing or shipping addresses of the victim (similar to how spam callers spoof your phone’s area code).