How Does Lunio Handle VPN & Proxy Connections?

VPNs and proxies are usually thought of as being malicious connections and a high fraud risk, however this is not always the case.

To help determine those connections which are legitimate from those which are fraudulent, Lunio splits VPN and Proxy detection in to two different categories - with unique algorithms and detection profiles for each. We've explained how we handle each below.

VPN Connections:

VPN connections can sometimes be used for malicious purposes, but they also have many legitimate uses.

For example, in the B2B space users will often connect to corporate networks via VPNs. These users will be legitimate, and are potential customers of yours. For this reason, we wouldn't place a blanket block on them.

Lunio will always assess the activity of the user themselves, beyond the simply fact of them using a VPN.

VPN usage is one factor we take in to account when analysing for fraudulent activity, but we will never block a user just because they are using a VPN. This is because there is a high chance they could be legitimate, and the last thing we want to be doing is blocking legitimate users from seeing your ads.

Proxy Connections:

Proxy connections have a much higher chance of being malicious than VPN connections.

Lunio maintains an internal blacklist of known proxy connection details & IP addresses. Our blacklist is one of the most comprehensive in the industry, with details on tens of millions of known proxy connections.

Our internal analysis shows that over 98.5% of ad clicks from proxy networks are non-legitimate users, with 70% of those being non-human. For this reason, we will block the users of proxies that exist on our blacklist by default.

In addition to using a proxy blacklist, we also perform a heuristic analysis on all IP addresses that pass through the Lunio system. This allows us to identify users behind proxies even if that proxy does not yet exist in our blacklist. In these circumstances, we perform a further analysis on the proxy network to determine legitimacy of the users coming from that network.

If the users are not legitimate, the proxy is added to our blacklist and the users are instantly blocked from clicking your Google Ads again.