[daqhris]

I'm a happy Mullvad user. But I have one concern.

Recently, Instagram "tagged" my account as either based in Russia or using Russian currency. I'm based in Western EU and set up the VPN to connect to the same country or neighboring ones.

I'm trying to figure out if some endpoints belonging to Mullvad have been shadowbanned by Meta/Instagram. Is there someone else who uses Mullvad to surf on Meta products whose account has been impacted by sanctions directed at Russia?

My first guess is that it's a mislabelling problem or bots going rogue for an unkown reason. And, IG support is taking too long to clarify what's the culprit. So, I'm making all kind of hypotheses to reach a logical explanation before getting an official answer.

[Thorentis]

I suspect that "Russian" will be the new pejorative that Big Tech is able to throw at anything they feel like banning. Want to ban a user for using a VPN because it's harder to track them? Accuse them of being "Russian linked" and bam, no further justification needed.

[TameAntelope]

You probably don't even need to lie, it's likely Russian hackers are using every major tor/VPN available commercially.

[wraptile]

I use Mullvad and I constantly run into things like ASN bans etc. For example, cloudflare often bans whole ASN making many websites not accessible through Mullvad.

Seems like mullvad is being used by a lot of bad actors and they're not really doing anything about it.

I like their software and monetization but their IPs are probably the lowest quality IPs in the VPN market.

[z3c0]

It's a bit odd to indict Mullvad for not doing anything about nefarious actors using their service, as the whole selling point of their service is that they don't keep track of who is up to what. If they start policing user traffic, I will cancel my service, and I'm sure many others would to.

FWIW I run my own VPN server on a common cloud provider, and I actually encounter more trouble there than when I'm logged into Mullvad. I think the services who can't think of more creative solutions than blanket IP bans are the real problem here.

[database64128]

> Seems like mullvad is being used by a lot of bad actors and they're not really doing anything about it.

If you set up your own VPN server on popular cloud platforms, you'll notice that almost all Cloud platforms face the same issue. Basically this is what you get when you use a data center IP for Internet browsing.

[tomxor]

I've noticed the IPs on their relatively newer servers using "xTom" as a provider are being incorrectly identified as Russian by some IP based geolocation services... it's a bit hit or miss.

I'm guessing xTom acquired an IP block from someone in Russia a while ago and IP geolation databases are just very slow to update.