Are Free Proxies Safe? Risks and Alternatives Explained

This guide covers: Are Free Proxies Safe? Risks and Alternatives Explained.

The economics of free proxies do not make sense unless someone somewhere is being paid in something other than money. Bandwidth costs money. Servers cost money. Maintaining a list of working proxy IPs costs operator time. The handful of legitimate free-proxy operators in the world are research projects, civil- society tools like Tor, and a few academic experiments that publish their findings. The other ten thousand "free proxy" lists you can find with one Google query are something else entirely. This article is about what that something else actually is, what the research has found people do with it, and why the cost of running your traffic through a random IP from a public list is almost always higher than whatever you thought you were saving.

The economics, briefly and honestly

Running a proxy that handles real-world traffic is not free even at small scale. A modest VPS to host one costs five to ten dollars a month. Bandwidth at any meaningful volume costs more. Operators who run proxies and do not charge for them are either: subsidizing the cost out of pocket because they have a non-commercial reason, or recovering the cost some other way. The list of "some other way" is short and not flattering: logging traffic for resale, injecting ads or affiliate codes, capturing credentials, mining cryptocurrency on visitor pages, or running the proxy on a host they do not actually own.

That last one is the surprising plurality of the free-proxy ecosystem. Many of the IPs on public lists are not rented servers running a deliberate proxy service; they are compromised home routers, IoT cameras, hacked WordPress sites, or open relays on misconfigured corporate gear. The "operator" is whoever scanned the internet for open ports and added the IP to a list. The host's real owner does not know their device is being used as a proxy and certainly did not consent. Routing your traffic through one of those is, in the most literal sense, riding piggyback on someone else's compromised equipment.

What free proxies actually do to your traffic

Multiple academic studies over the past decade have measured what happens when you route real traffic through free proxy IPs pulled from public lists. The findings rhyme across the years.

Christian Haschek, an Austrian researcher, ran the most-cited study in 2015. He pulled 25,000 free-proxy IPs from public sources and ran controlled tests through each. Roughly seventy percent of them modified HTTP traffic in some detectable way. Fewer than ten percent supported HTTPS at all. The remainder were either non-functional, intermittently functional, or actively malicious. He published his methodology and the findings have been repeated by other researchers since with consistent shape, even as the absolute numbers move year to year.

The categories of malicious behavior that show up in those studies, in rough order of frequency:

• Ad and affiliate injection.The proxy rewrites HTML in transit to add ads, replace existing ads with the operator's, or insert affiliate IDs into shopping links. The user sees a slightly different page than the real one and the operator earns referral fees. Quiet, common, low-grade.
• JavaScript injection. The proxy adds a tracking script, an analytics tag, or a cryptominer to every HTML response. The 2017-2018 Coinhive cryptojacking wave used this technique extensively before Coinhive itself shut down. Modern variants use newer mining libraries with the same delivery vector.
• Clipboard hijacking via JavaScript.The injected script watches for cryptocurrency wallet addresses on the clipboard and silently substitutes the attacker's address. A user copying a Bitcoin or Ethereum address pastes a different one. The technique is deeply scummy and works depressingly often.
• Credential and cookie theft. Plain HTTP traffic carries cookies, auth tokens, and form data unencrypted. A logging proxy records all of it. HTTPS mostly mitigates this but not always; some proxies deliberately downgrade or proxy-strip HTTPS where they can.
• TLS interception with attacker-controlled certificates. A small but real fraction of free proxies present their own certificates for HTTPS sites and try to get the browser to accept them. Modern browsers warn loudly. Users sometimes click through. When they do, the proxy has full visibility into the encrypted traffic.
• Modified file downloads. Software installers fetched over HTTP can be replaced in transit with malicious versions. Several documented campaigns have used this as the initial-access vector for malware.

The compromised-host problem and your legal exposure

When you route traffic through a proxy IP, you are sending bytes from your machine, through that intermediate IP, out to the destination. From the destination's perspective the traffic came from the proxy. From the proxy host's perspective, traffic appeared on its network interface and went out again.

Now consider what happens when that proxy host is a compromised home router that the legitimate owner does not know is being used. You have been making outbound connections to whatever sites you visited. The owner's ISP sees their line generating that traffic. If you happened to visit anything illegal — even something you did not realize was illegal in your jurisdiction — the trail leads to the owner's home, not yours. They get the visit from law enforcement. You get away with it.

That is not a hypothetical. There have been documented cases of innocent owners of compromised home networks being investigated for child sexual abuse material trafficked through their compromised routers. The cases are rare and usually resolve once forensics establishes the compromise, but the experience for the victim is devastating. Routing through a free proxy on a compromised host means contributing to that ecosystem, and the people most likely to be hurt are not you.

The reverse case also exists. Tor exit node operators in several jurisdictions have been raided, charged, or sued because illegal traffic exited from their nodes. The cases usually resolve in favor of the operator after long investigations, but the existence of those cases demonstrates the principle: when you route traffic through someone's IP, downstream activity gets attributed to them. Free-proxy lists, by accident or design, distribute that attribution risk to people who never agreed to take it.

The Hola, 911.re, and Socks5Systemz cases

Three documented incidents shape how anyone should think about residential proxy supply.

Hola VPN, 2015.Hola was a free VPN browser extension with millions of users. In May 2015 researchers documented that Hola was reselling its free users as exit nodes through a sister service called Luminati (later renamed Bright Data). Free Hola users were routing other people's traffic through their home connections without understanding the arrangement. Among the documented uses were a botnet attack on the imageboard 8chan, with the attack traffic exiting from Hola users. Hola users were unwitting participants in a denial-of-service campaign run from their own residential connections. The story made it explicit that "free" in this market really did mean the user was the product.

911.re, 2022.911.re was a long-running residential proxy service that, at its peak, was selling access to millions of compromised devices. Brian Krebs and other researchers documented that the service's residential proxies were sourced not from consenting users but from devices infected with what amounted to malware. A pirated software distribution channel was bundling silent proxy clients into installers; users running the cracked software became unwitting exit nodes. 911.re shut down in July 2022 after a series of public disclosures. The malware infrastructure was left in place; subsequent research has traced overlapping operations to other services that continued the model.

Socks5Systemz and Faceless, 2023-2024.Spur, a detection-focused threat-intel firm, published research in late 2023 and early 2024 documenting two large residential proxy networks built from malware infections. Socks5Systemz had compromised an estimated 250,000 devices globally; Faceless was selling access to a similar pool. The infections came through pirated software, fake browser extensions, and malicious advertising; the victims' devices were enrolled into proxy networks and their bandwidth was sold to paying customers, often for credential stuffing, scraping behind paywalls, and ad fraud. Both operations remained active as of early 2026.

The pattern repeats: a service advertises "residential proxies" at low cost. The supply comes from compromised consumer devices. The customers are running activities they do not want traced to themselves. The infected device owners carry the legal and security exposure. None of this happens in the open paid market with vendors like Bright Data, Smartproxy, or Oxylabs, which require KYC and contractual controls; it happens in the underground and in the cheap residential pools that look superficially similar.

Reliability problems you will hit immediately

Even if you somehow find an honest free proxy, the engineering is bad. Free proxies have one consistent property across every public list: they are unreliable to the point of being unusable for anything you actually care about.

• Half-life of hours. Public proxy lists churn constantly. IPs go offline, get blacklisted, get rate-limited, or get pulled by their host operators. The list you used yesterday is mostly different from the list today. Fewer than half of any cohort survives a week.
• Blacklist propagation. The moment an IP appears on a public list, detection vendors index it. By the time you try to use it, every major fraud-protection service has already classified it as proxy traffic. Your login fails, your signup is challenged, your checkout is rejected. The list itself is the warning bell.
• Latency spikes and timeouts. Free proxies are oversubscribed by design. A working IP at 9am is drowning at 11am as everyone using the same list piles on. Median latency on free proxy IPs runs several times worse than a native connection; the long tail can be minutes per request.
• Unpredictable header leaks. Many free proxies forward the original client IP in the X-Forwarded-For, Via, or X-Real-IP header. The destination sees both the proxy IP and your real IP. The anonymization is a mirage.

The narrow cases where a free proxy is arguably defensible

There are a few situations where the risk profile of a free proxy genuinely is acceptable.

• A one-time check that a public site is reachable from a different geographic region. No login, no form submission, no sensitive data transmitted, just confirming whether a page loads.
• A throwaway browsing session in a disposable VM where a compromised proxy cannot reach anything you care about. Useful for security research or isolation testing.
• Deliberate research into proxy behavior — running controlled test traffic through proxies to study what they modify.
• Tor, which is technically a free proxy network but architecturally and operationally completely different from the public-list ecosystem. It is run by a non-profit, has a transparent design, has been audited repeatedly, and does not log. It is also slower than direct connections and aggressively challenged by many sites, which is the fair price of its security model.

Even in those cases, stick to HTTPS sites only, never log in to anything, never submit forms, and treat the proxy connection as observed.

Safer alternatives that cost a few dollars at most

For nearly every real-world use case, paying a small amount of money buys an enormous improvement in safety, reliability, and the absence of legal weirdness.

• A reputable consumer VPN. Mullvad costs five euros a month, takes cash by mail if you want, and has an audited no-logs posture. Proton VPN has a free tier (slower, fewer servers) and reasonable paid plans. NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, IVPN — pick one with an independent audit and a public ownership structure. Whatever you do, the answer is a paid VPN, not a free proxy.
• Tor Browser. Free, well-engineered, designed for anonymity rather than throughput. Use it when the threat model genuinely requires anonymity, not when you just want to bypass a regional block.
• A paid proxy service. Bright Data, Smartproxy, Oxylabs, Soax, IPRoyal — all charge real money and do not pretend otherwise. KYC requirements have tightened across the industry since 2022, partly in response to the underground supply scandals. If you have a real need for proxy infrastructure (scraping public data, ad verification, regional QA), one of these is the answer.
• Encrypted DNS plus HTTPS-only mode.If the goal is "hide my browsing from the ISP," configure DNS over HTTPS to a privacy-respecting resolver (Cloudflare 1.1.1.1, NextDNS, Quad9) and turn on HTTPS-only browsing. That covers a meaningful slice of what people install proxies for, without introducing a new middleman.

If you are determined to use one anyway, verify first

A ten-minute verification routine catches most of the outright dangerous proxies. None of it makes a free proxy safe; it just makes the worst category of harm less likely.

1. Open our IP Address Lookup through the proxy and confirm the visible IP actually changed. If it did not, your client is not using the proxy and you have learned nothing.
2. Run our ASN Lookup on the new IP. A residential ASN on what is sold as a "commercial proxy" is the strongest single signal that the host is compromised. A data-center ASN on what is sold as a "residential proxy" is the inverse marketing scam. Either way, ASN reality should match the marketing.
3. Run our Reverse DNS Lookup and read the PTR. Hosting providers leave fingerprints there. So do residential ISPs. The PTR usually settles the question of what kind of host you are connecting through.
4. Run our DNS Leak Test. A proxy that does not also handle DNS lets your real ISP see every domain you visit. Not the worst thing in the world, but it confirms that the proxy is partial rather than complete.
5. Run our WebRTC Leak Test. Browser WebRTC stacks regularly leak the real public IP past proxy configurations.
6. Visit a site whose source you know well — your own domain, or a static page you control — and view the page source. Compare to a direct fetch. If the proxied version contains anything the direct version does not, the proxy is injecting content.
7. Watch for any TLS certificate warnings on known-good HTTPS sites. If the browser complains about certificate mismatches on banks, social networks, or other large properties, the proxy is intercepting TLS and you should close the browser without clicking through.

What happens when you put a banking session through a free proxy

Walk through the scenario. You have decided to use a free proxy to access your bank's website from a region where it normally blocks foreign logins. You point your browser at a proxy IP from a public list. Your bank's site loads, the login page appears, you enter username and password.

Best case: the proxy is honest and adds nothing. Your password reaches the bank, you authenticate, and you complete whatever banking task you needed. Two practical problems still occurred. First, the bank's fraud system observed a login from a new IP that almost certainly registers as a proxy or hosting endpoint. The account is now flagged for review, and the next several legitimate logins from your real IP are likely to require additional verification. Second, the bank's session ties to that proxy IP for the duration of the session; if the proxy drops mid-session, the session ends and any in-progress transaction may need to be redone or, in some jurisdictions, manually unblocked by support.

Realistic case: the proxy operator logs the session. Username, password, account number, balance, and the 2FA code if one came through over plain HTTP fragments on the same connection. Within hours or days, those credentials are sold or used. The first sign for you is a fraudulent transaction notification from the bank. Recovery involves the bank's fraud department, an affidavit, possibly police reports, and weeks of cleanup. The proxy operator is anonymous and uncatchable. The financial loss may be recovered by the bank under consumer protection rules, but only after the inconvenience.

Worst case: the proxy injects JavaScript into the bank's page, which you do not notice because the injection is small and the page still works. The injected script captures keystrokes, intercepts the in-page transfer form before submission, and silently rewrites the destination account number to one controlled by the operator. You initiate a transfer to your spouse for two hundred dollars; the actual transfer goes to a money mule for a different amount. By the time you notice on the next statement, the funds are long gone.

Banking on a free proxy is the most extreme case but the principle generalizes. Any session involving real money, real accounts, or real identity should never go through a proxy whose operator you cannot identify and hold accountable. The bar for trust on a proxy is the same bar as for sharing your password with a stranger, and the public-list ecosystem is designed to make that stranger anonymous to you while you remain identified to them.

Tor as the legitimate exception

Tor is technically a free proxy network. It is also completely unlike anything in the public-list ecosystem, and the differences are worth understanding because they are the differences that define what "safe free proxy" actually requires.

Tor routes each connection through three randomly chosen relays operated by volunteers, with three layers of encryption between them. The first relay (the entry guard) knows your IP but not the destination. The third relay (the exit) knows the destination but not your IP. The middle relay knows neither. No single relay can correlate your identity with your traffic. The cryptographic design is public, has been studied for two decades, and has survived the attention of multiple state-level adversaries.

The Tor Project, the non-profit that maintains the software, publishes its threat model explicitly. Tor protects against most network-level adversaries; it does not protect against an adversary that controls both the entry and exit relays simultaneously. It does not protect against application-layer mistakes (logging into your Facebook account through Tor while signed into the same account elsewhere). And it cannot make a website that deploys aggressive bot detection treat you as a normal user; Tor exit IPs are well-known and frequently challenged.

For the right threat model — journalists protecting sources, citizens of repressive regimes accessing independent news, researchers studying censorship — Tor is genuinely free and genuinely safer than the public-list-proxy ecosystem by every measure that matters. For casual region-shifting to watch a different Netflix catalog, Tor is overkill, slow, and frequently blocked. The right tool depends on the actual goal.

Court cases and the documented legal exposure

Several jurisdictions have produced case law that bears on free-proxy use, both for users and for hosts.

The Tor exit node prosecutions. Several Tor exit operators have been raided, charged, or sued over content that exited through their nodes. The 2016 Austrian case of an exit operator charged over CSAM traffic was eventually resolved in his favor after forensics established the traffic originated elsewhere, but the months of investigation were genuine. Similar cases have played out in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. The Tor Project maintains a list of legal precedents and offers guidance to operators considering running an exit.

The 911.re downstream cases. When 911.re was disclosed in 2022, several FBI investigations revealed that customer activity through the service had been traced to compromised home networks. The infected device owners were not charged, but the investigations consumed time and attention from people who had nothing to do with the underlying crimes. Several documented cases involved temporary computer seizures from owners whose only connection to the case was that their compromised router had been used as an exit.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the United States.Routing traffic through a host without the owner's consent can fall under unauthorized-access provisions in many jurisdictions. Successful prosecutions of free-proxy users specifically are rare; the legal exposure is more theoretical than practical for casual use, but the theoretical exposure is real and exists.

GDPR and similar privacy regulation. For organizational use, sending user traffic through a third party without a documented data-processing agreement is difficult to reconcile with consent and accountability requirements. A paid proxy service with a contract is the practical baseline for any business use case; a free proxy is functionally non-compliant by default.

How sites detect proxy traffic

Detection is mature, layered, and unimpressed by free proxies in particular. The signals stack on top of each other and even "elite" proxies leak through enough of them to be classified.

• ASN reputation. Detection vendors (Spur.us, IPQualityScore, IPHub, MaxMind minFraud, ProxyCheck.io) maintain rolling classifications of every IP block on the internet. Data-center ASNs are flagged on sight; known proxy ranges have higher fraud scores; the residential pools tied to compromised-device networks like Socks5Systemz are explicitly tagged.
• Reverse DNS. Hostname patterns reveal the host type — generic data-center, named hosting provider, residential ISP, mobile carrier. PTR data combined with ASN data alone gets to high confidence on most classifications.
• TLS and HTTP/2 fingerprints.JA3, JA4, and JARM produce cryptographic fingerprints from the TLS handshake that identify the underlying client library. A "free proxy + curl" combination has a fingerprint different from any real browser. Even curl-impersonate cannot perfectly match Chrome's full handshake plus HTTP/2 priority tree across every version.
• Header anomalies. Extra forwarding headers, missing common headers, mis-cased header names, or wrong header order all leak proxy presence.
• Behavioral patterns. A single IP making thousands of login attempts per minute or hitting the same path at machine speed is a proxy signal regardless of any other characteristic. Humans do not behave that way.

Residential, data-center, and mobile proxies, briefly

The paid market splits into three tiers, and free proxy marketing borrows the labels without the substance.

• Data-center proxies run on commercial hosting like AWS, Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean. Cheap, fast, easy to detect by ASN. Acceptable for scraping public data from sites that do not deploy serious anti-bot protection. Useless against any consumer-facing platform that has invested in detection.
• Residential proxiesroute through real consumer ISP connections. The legitimate paid supply comes from peer-to-peer apps where users have agreed (clearly or buried in terms of service) to share their bandwidth in exchange for some service. The illegitimate supply comes from compromised devices. Free "residential" proxies are almost certainly the latter.
• Mobile proxies exit through real cellular networks. They carry the strongest anti-detection profile because mobile IPs share NAT addresses across many users and rotate frequently. Most expensive paid option. Effectively never appears on free lists, because mobile carriers do not allow apps that would let a free proxy live on a real cellular connection.

A useful test: the marketing claim of "free residential proxies" is, almost without exception, either marketing misuse of the term (the IPs are actually data-center) or the supply comes from compromised devices. There is no third option that has been documented anywhere.

Inside the "free proxy list" sites

The websites that publish free-proxy lists are themselves an interesting business. They appear at the top of every search for "free proxy", refresh their lists every few minutes, and rank consistently across geographic searches. The economics of running them looks something like this.

The site itself runs on advertising, often the most aggressive kind — pop-ups, redirects, and the occasional malicious ad-network injection. Some of these sites have been documented serving exploit kits to visitors. A user looking for free proxies is, by definition, not using a hardened browser configuration, which makes the audience an attractive target for malicious advertising.

The lists themselves come from a handful of sources: large-scale port scanning of the public IPv4 space looking for open proxy ports (8080, 3128, 80, 1080), aggregation from other lists, and in some cases direct supply from honeypot operators or malware networks who publish the IPs they control. The same IP appears across dozens of sites within hours of being scanned. The list operators rarely test the proxies for malicious behavior; they test only that the IP responds, which is a much weaker check.

A few sites do more. Spys.one publishes uptime and latency metadata, which is useful for filtering down to working proxies even though it does nothing for safety. ProxyScrape and free-proxy.cz have similar offerings. None of them provide attestation that the listed proxies are not malicious, because such attestation is essentially impossible to give for a continuously rotating list of third-party hosts.

The detection landscape in 2026

For anyone evaluating whether a free proxy will actually work for the use case they have in mind, the detection side has moved decisively against proxies in the last few years. A short tour of the current state:

• Spur.us publishes one of the most aggressive proxy classification feeds in the industry, with explicit tags for known residential proxy networks (including Socks5Systemz and Faceless), VPN ranges, and mobile proxy operators. Major financial-services and e-commerce platforms ingest this feed directly into their fraud rules.
• IPQualityScore combines IP reputation with behavioral data to score risk on a 0-100 scale. Free proxies almost universally score above 75. The service is reasonably priced and shows up on the backend of many e-commerce risk decisions.
• MaxMind minFraud ties IP reputation to identity-graph data including past chargebacks and email-domain risk. A free proxy with no other context flags as elevated risk; a free proxy combined with a freshly-created email and a new payment method typically triggers automatic decline.
• IPHub and ProxyCheck.io are the smaller, free-tier-friendly classification services. Useful for personal verification before trusting a proxy; their accuracy is decent for the obvious cases and weaker on edge cases.
• Cloudflare Bot Management, Akamai Bot Manager, DataDome, hCaptcha Enterprise all run before the origin sees the request. Their decisions consume all of the above feeds plus their own behavioral models, and they are tuned to challenge or block free-proxy traffic on the assumption that it is bot activity. By the time your request reaches the application, the decision has already been made.

The practical implication: a free proxy that "works" in the sense of carrying your traffic to the destination is not the same as a free proxy that gets you treated like a normal user. The former is common; the latter is increasingly rare. Most sites worth bypassing have invested enough in detection that the public-list-proxy approach simply no longer accomplishes anything other than triggering security challenges.

Common myths about free proxies

• "HTTPS protects me on a free proxy." It protects the content of HTTPS traffic. It does not protect the destination metadata; the proxy still sees where you are connecting. It does not protect you against a proxy that downgrades HTTPS to HTTP on sites that allow it. It does not protect you against TLS interception when the user clicks through certificate warnings.
• "Anonymous proxies are anonymous." The label refers to whether the proxy strips its forwarding headers, not to whether the proxy is anonymous from the operator's perspective. The operator sees everything that passes through.
• "Elite proxies cannot be detected." Untrue against modern detection. ASN, PTR, TLS fingerprint, and behavioral signals classify proxy traffic without needing to inspect headers. The "elite" label dates from a more naive detection era.
• "A VPN is just a fancy proxy." Functionally similar but with two important differences: a VPN is system-wide rather than per-app, and a paid consumer VPN comes with a commercial relationship that gives the provider a reason to behave. A free proxy gives the operator no such reason.
• "Tor is a free proxy." Architecturally yes, operationally completely different. Tor is run by a non-profit, has been audited repeatedly, uses three-hop onion routing rather than single-hop forwarding, and explicitly publishes its threat model. The risks are different (slower, more detection by destination sites) and almost entirely separate from the public-list-proxy ecosystem.

Frequently asked questions

Are there any free proxies that are safe? Tor is the closest to a yes. A handful of academic and civil-society proxy networks have transparent governance and publish their methodology. The random "free proxy list" sites are not in that category and never have been.

Does HTTPS fully protect me on a free proxy? It protects the page content, mostly. It does not protect the destination hostname or connection timing. It does not protect against deliberate TLS interception if you click through warnings. And it does nothing against the operator building a profile of where you connect.

Is a VPN a type of proxy? Yes, functionally. A VPN is a tunnel-mode proxy with transport-layer encryption between your device and the VPN server. The operational differences — system-wide tunnel, commercial relationship, audited posture — are what matter in practice.

Why do free proxies appear on public lists? Some are misconfigured corporate gear with open ports. Some are honeypots run for research. Some are scraped from compromised devices. A few are deliberately run as public-service projects. The lists themselves do not distinguish between these origins, which is itself the problem.

Could I get in legal trouble for using a free proxy? Possibly, depending on jurisdiction and what you do. Routing traffic through a compromised host without consent is illegal in most jurisdictions. Using the proxy to do something else illegal compounds it. Using a paid service with a transparent operator relocates the legal responsibility to a documented contractual relationship, which is part of why paid services are worth their cost.

Are paid "residential" proxies safe to use? Safer than free, but not without responsibility. The major paid providers (Bright Data, Smartproxy, Oxylabs) have moved toward KYC and contractual restrictions on use cases since 2022. Cheaper paid services with no KYC may be sourcing supply from the same compromised-device networks that fuel the free underground. Look for explicit statements about how the residential supply is recruited; if there is nothing, assume the worst.

How do free proxies compare to free VPNs? Free VPNs have a marginally better baseline because they are at least running an actual service with an identifiable provider. The Hola scandal and several similar cases show that "free VPN" can also mean "your bandwidth is the product." Read the privacy policy. If the provider sells "peer" or "residential" access alongside the free VPN, your connection is part of the supply.

What about free proxies bundled with browsers? Opera's built-in "VPN" (technically a proxy) and Brave's Tor mode are reasonable for casual region testing but should not be confused with a real VPN. They narrow the threat model rather than eliminating it.

For the deeper picture, read What Is a Proxy Server for the technical foundation, Proxy vs VPN for the comparison, and What Is Tor? for the case where free actually works. To verify a proxy before trusting it, start with Proxy Check and confirm against the visible IP on the homepage.

By Theodore Uzun

Founder and Senior Software Engineer, IP Trackers

Published January 9, 2026Editorially reviewed