Fake IP Address to Mask Your Identity – 2024 Guide

Fake IP address usage is rapidly increasing these days. Most online users prefer anonymous communication. As IP addresses uniquely identify a device in the network, users are opting for fake IP addresses to mask their identity from the network.  Statistics say that the number of unique IP addresses in 2017  increased by 6 million from

Fake IP address usage is rapidly increasing these days. Most online users prefer anonymous communication. As IP addresses uniquely identify a device in the network, users are opting for fake IP addresses to mask their identity from the network. 

Statistics say that the number of unique IP addresses in 2017  increased by 6 million from the previous year. This data clearly indicates the fastly growing IP address usage. This rapid increase may be because people these days use more than one IP address to mask their actual IP address. 

This article will help you understand the need for a Fake IP address, and will teach you how to mask your identity with fake IP addresses.

Table of Contents

• A Fake IP Address
• The Benefits of Using a Fake IP address
• Ways to Mask Your Identity?
• Web Proxy to Mask Your Identity
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Final Thoughts

A Fake IP Address

Fake IP addresses are the IP addresses that hide the actual IP addresses of the device and act on their behalf.

An IP address is more like the residential address of a person. Each device in the network has an unique number that distinctly identifies each user. The fake IP address concept comes into the picture when internet users don’t want web servers and Internet Service Providers to identify them. To hide their originality, they mask themselves with a fake IP address. These fake IP addresses are simply the IP addresses of other devices with which the users conceal their own identity.

The Benefits of Using a Fake IP address

People usually go for fake IP addresses to ensure anonymity. That is not the only advantage. Fake IP addresses can help people in many other cases as well. Here are some of them:

IP Blocks

If your own IP address gets blocked by a certain web server, you will definitely need an alternative to access those websites. This is when a fake IP address helps. People can use a randomly generated IP address, or an IP address of other users to access the site that blocked you. IP bans may be due to any reason, such as:

• Some sites might track their competitors IP addresses and block them from accessing their confidential data.
• If you have loaded the destination server with multiple requests, the server might block traffic from your IP address, suspecting your identity to be bots.
• Websites may block IP addresses from certain locations to access their site.

When your own IP address is blocked for some of the above stated reasons, a fake IP address can help you.

Global Proxies

Another main usage of fake IP addresses is to overcome geographical restrictions. Some websites do not allow users from foreign countries to access their sites. The other case is that some websites or applications are banned in specific countries. In these two cases, people may use fake IP addresses to remove the geo blocks.

Anonymity

This is the most common reason why people use fake IP addresses. Internet users these days do not just stop with casual browsing and stuff. They tend to explore all the possible applications of the internet. While entering into scraping operations or accessing restricted sites, users access the desired sites without revealing their own IP addresses. This is another place where they use fake IP addresses.

Increase Traffic

With fake IP addresses, users can increase their website visitors count. When a person visits a site with the same IP address, it becomes inorganic traffic. To make the traffic appear organic, they prefer multiple fake IP addresses in the place of their real IP addresses.

ProxyScrape is one of the most popular proxy vendors who furnish quality proxy addresses that can help you to mask your identity. Check out their features and secure your proxy. 

Ways to Mask Your Identity?

Using a fake IP address to mask your identity has many options. Some of those possibilities are discussed below:

Public Wi-FI – Using the public wi-fi is the simplest way of masking your identity. When you do this, you can access sites through the IP address of the public wi-fi device and so you don’t have to reveal yours. But this is not the safest option. There are possibilities of identity theft and cyber threats. When you are using the common wi-fi, which many people use, it is easy for attackers to hack the information from your web request among the web traffic.

Random IP Generator Websites – There are plenty of random IP address producing websites that generate random IP addresses. You can make use of one of them to create new addresses and use them for your scraping applications. You can also use IP generating extensions from Google Web Store.

Datacenter VPN – You can make use of VPN service of a datacenter. The data centers have a bulk of free VPNs or paid VPNs, which you can use to hide your identity.

Web Proxy – Though you have multiple options, using a web proxy provides a high level of security. You can use the free proxy service and their free proxy list of the proxy vendor. But the paid proxies work better at masking your identity than free IPs as they are fresh and live proxies. 

Web Proxy to Mask Your Identity

Coming to the usage of a fake IP address in place of an original IP address, configuring web proxy addresses with the browsers stands the wise choice to hide your identity from web servers, and Internet Service Providers. To prevent servers from tracking you, use proxy with the browser environment. 

Configure Fake IP Address in Chrome

1. To configure a fake IP address with your Chrome browser, click on the vertically aligned dots on the top right corner of the window.
2. From the list, select the “settings” option.

3. Then in the “settings” window, enter “proxy” in the “search settings bar.”
4. There, you will find settings relevant to the proxy that appears on the screen.
5. You can also open “proxy settings” by navigating through the “Network and Internet Settings” Option.
6. Among the search appearances, select the “Open your computer’s proxy setting option.”

7. In the “proxy setting window” you will find two categories: “automatic proxy setup” and “manual proxy setup.”
8. You can configure proxies with any of those two categories.
9. The “use setup script” option under the automatic category lets you assign a proxy script to the browser.
10. You can also configure proxies manually using the “use a proxy server” option under the “manual proxy setup” category.

11. Then click on the “set up” button, and enter the proxy address as a fake IP address, which will represent you in the network.

Configure a Fake IP Address in Firefox

Here are the steps to configure popular web proxies as your fake IP address to stay anonymous on the site. 

1. First open Firefox browser to proceed with the following.
2. If you don’t have a Firefox browser, you can download it directly from Download Firefox. You can also download Firefox using the Firefox extension available in store.
3. Then open the Firefox browser and click on the application menu that is located on the top right corner.
4. Then from the list that appears, select the “settings” option.

5. Then enter “proxy” in the “search bar” of the “settings window”.

6. You can also reach “proxy settings” through the “Network Settings” option.
7. Then,  click on the “proxy settings” option and open the “connection” tab.
8. There, out of many configuration options, you will find the “manual proxy setup” and “automatic proxy setup” options.

9. You can enter the “proxy address” or the “proxy configuration URL” in their respective columns. 

Configure a Fake IP Address in Microsoft Edge

Configuring a Fake IP address with Microsoft Edge browser is more similar to the steps of Chrome browser.

1. Like Chrome, open the “Edge browser” and click on the “application menu.”
2. Then, from the list, select the “settings” option.
3. Next, a “setting window” should appear as shown below.
4. Then, follow the same steps as in Google Chrome.
5. Enter the word “proxy” in the “search bar” and click on “open your computer’s proxy settings.”

6. You will see a “proxy setting window.”

7. Use the fake IP address that you want to use in the “manual proxy setup” option. 

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQs:

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Android Proxy Settings

Final Thoughts

People may feel that using a fake IP address and concealing their true identity is something illegal, but this is not always the case. Sometimes, we are supposed to mask our identity for security purposes to prevent our data from cyber security threats. Web servers will use proxies to mask their identity to stay anonymous from the clients. They can stay anonymous from the clients and still communicate with them using the proxy. If you are searching for options that can help you with anonymity, web proxy can be a wise option. This is because they use their own proxy server’s IP address to help users.