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Troubleshooting

“Anonymous proxy detected” — what the site actually saw

The message means the site recognised your exit address as belonging to a proxy or hosting provider. It is a judgement about the address, not about anything you did.

Quick answer

The address gave you away, not your browser.

Sites buy or build lists of address ranges that belong to datacentres, VPNs and known proxy services. If your exit address sits in one, the verdict is made before your request is even parsed. Changing browser or clearing cookies does nothing; changing to a residential address does.

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How detection actually works

Every IP address belongs to an organisation, and that ownership is public. Address ranges registered to hosting companies, cloud providers and known proxy operators are catalogued, and any site can check an incoming address against those catalogues in a millisecond. That check is what produced the message you saw.

Some services go further and look at behaviour — how many different accounts have been seen from that address, whether it appears in abuse feeds, whether its reverse DNS looks like a server. But the first and most common signal is simply: this address belongs to a datacentre, and real customers do not browse from datacentres.

What does not fix it

Clearing cookies, switching browsers, using incognito mode, changing your user agent, disabling WebRTC — none of these change the address your request arrived from, so none of them change the verdict. Neither does switching to a different datacentre proxy, which is the mistake that wastes the most time: the new address is in the same category as the old one.

What does fix it

A residential address. These are addresses assigned by consumer internet providers to homes, so they are registered to an ISP rather than a hosting company and they carry the reputation of ordinary domestic traffic. A mobile address, assigned by a carrier to a SIM, is stronger still because carriers share addresses among many subscribers, which makes blanket blocking expensive for the site.

Check what your current setup looks like from outside before you change anything — the IP check tool shows the address and who owns it, which is the same information the site is looking at.

Testing that the fix worked

Send one request through the new address and read the result, rather than reloading the site and hoping:

curl -x http://USER:PASS@HOST:PORT https://api.ipify.org
curl -x socks5h://USER:PASS@HOST:PORT https://api.ipify.org

If the address that comes back belongs to an internet provider rather than a hosting company, the detection you were hitting is gone. IP2World's residential pool carries both HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 on the same credentials, so either line above works.

FAQ

Anonymous proxy detection questions

Why does a site say it detected a proxy when I am not using one?

Some networks route you through a shared gateway that looks like a datacentre — corporate networks, some mobile carriers and most VPNs. Check who owns your current address; that is what the site checked.

Can a residential proxy still be detected?

It can be identified as a proxy by behaviour if you hammer one address, but it is not flagged on ownership alone, which is what the datacentre verdict is based on.

Does a VPN help?

Usually not. VPN endpoints are servers in datacentres, so they are in the same category as the address that just got refused.

Is there a way to test before paying?

Yes. Connect Telegram to a new IP2World account and one gigabyte lands on your balance, which is plenty to check whether the site accepts a residential address.

Rotating residential proxies, straight from IP2World

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