Hello everyone, I live in the US and work from home but I will be moving to Germany very soon and cannot quit my job yet. Is it possible for me to go to Germany and use a VPN that shows that I’m in the US and get away with it or will I get caught? Thank you so much for your help.
Edit: thx for everyone answering, i forgot to mention that i will be working from my private laptop in germany while the work laptop will be loged in by someone in the us
Yes, if the IP address is a known pool of VPN endpoints
Will you be able to leave a running PC in the US (at parents etc)
There is a Meshnet option where you connect to another pc you own and then from there out to the internet
You know you will be on a completely different timezone? 6 to 9 ahead of the US timesones. This means that you will have to work in german local time zone from 16:00 to 24:00 or from 19:00 to 03:00 in the morning if you plan on working 8 hours a day following the US time zones.
Are you ready for this for a long time?
The short answer; you might get caught. It all depends on what you do for a living and how well-resourced your company’s IT/SecOps department is.
If your company is monitoring such things, they’ll know what IP address you use currently connect to company systems - i.e. your home internet connection. It’s pretty easy to see if an IP address belongs to a residential user, or a server likely used by a VPN (even if it’s in the US). So if they are watching, they’d probably be able to deduce you’re using a VPN. They wouldn’t know you were connecting from Germany necessarily, just that you were probably using a VPN all of a sudden. This’d likely look suspicious and you may get questioned on it.
If you really wanted to remain undetected, the safest route would be to remotely use the connection of a residential provider (i.e. a personal VPN), preferably the same ISP you’re currently with. The setup involved in doing this would be tricky, and likely require you to know someone back in the US willing to maintain this for you.
This is all in theory, of course. It all depends on the nature of your work and the monitoring that the company you work for employs. If you’re working for a small 10 employee company, they may never know. If you’re working for a big multinational or government agency, they’d probably figure something was up. Some organisations even outright ban VPN connections.
Germany will care. Any work performed on German soil must abide by German labor laws. Additionally, if this is not reported to the tax authority you will then be tangled in all kinds of tax evasion fraud. Because you are not paying taxes properly.
Get a permanent IP from NORD and start using it before you go. Say your router or whole building is VPN protected and stick to same IP when away. They will see that your IP is consistent and not suspect anything fishy.
Maybe get a local number through Hushd or a phone app and get that number in as yr work contract before going because the dial tone and out of service messages will be different in Germany.
Start the stealth moves ASAP don’t wait till you go.
It might be better to get a cloud server or Windows VPS in the States, maybe even run a complete remote desktop, rather than using a VPN where the IP’s will mostly be known and detected. Will be more reliable than leaving a laptop on permanently at a friends or parents back in the US. The question is whether they might still be able to detect an IP that is not within a range owned by a domestic ISP.
Go read up on this over at r/digitalnomad.
There’s a way, but quite a few people have been got who didn’t use the proper precautions (just a VPN is not enough). Follow their advice.
Depends on your Org, it’s IT/CyberSec department, and policies. I have Defender for cloud apps to alert me anytime an anonymous or proxy IP is used. I also have it setup to flag certain ISPs that consumer VPNs are known to use. If a user gets flagged using a VPN like Nord, I disable the account and shoot an email over to the persons manager.
If it’s on a known device on their management console then they would be able to tell and also be able to tell it’s you. If you’re connected to a managed network on your personal device then they can see you are using a vpn but won’t know it’s you.
Yes, and if they are not irresponsible they will not let you.
I signed into a VPN from home that showed me in Germany. I was on a personal phone with corporate Microsoft account and IT called to see if I was indeed in Germany. It was a weekend as well. Just assume you’re being watched.
I recall being blocked before but switching my settings to use TCP specifically for my VPN traffic over a certain port, it was no longer blocked… so the firewall was no longer detecting it as VPN traffic.
Just get a VPS in the states, install a VPN server, connect to that. Much Less likely that it will be caught up with known VPN addresses.
You can just use “Remote Desktop” to connect to your work laptop in the US. From your perspective there’s no difference. However you have no way of knowing what your company tracks (if anything) or how well they monitor things.
Also if you have 2 factor authentication on your phone you have to also leave that always VPN connected.
All depends how close the company looks, some companies will email the manager when anybody logs on from out of country , others have very struck privacy ethics and don’t do looks at all unless it’s looks criminal.
Don’t use a commercial VPN as the IP pools are known, get your own VPS or use your home router (parents maybe) to terminate your vpn tunnel on and also don’t do the vpn from a small router you connect to with wifi rather than software vpn from your notebook as the connection would be reported in the logs.
Use a mesh network on Nord. They don’t do a great job of explaining this, but let’s say that you have a home computer or you have a friend in my case. Let’s say it’s in Chicago. I enable that computer on whatever network.
If you use Nord the way you get around that is a mesh network. Pretty much any large company can figure out the addresses that Nord itself uses. However, a mesh network works like this in simple terms. You have a home with Internet service and you set up that exact computer in your home to access the Internet from anywhere in the world so there’s no way that it looks any different than you’re working from your own home in your own country. In the absence of having a home in your previous city, you can just buy a notebook computer and have a friend hook it up. If I live in downtown Milwaukee, I use a computer that I would normally access the Internet from. I move to Mexico and every time I connect to the Internet instead of using one of Nord’s pretty much well known addresses. I’m actually physically using my computer in Milwaukee. Again, if you have anyone, you know in the city and you simply buy a notebook and set this up, it’s gonna work the same way.
My company knows I use vpn. They had IT rework things so when we log into our company website it knows I’m using a VPN and prevents me from signing in regardless of a personal computer. Maybe I just have to get a vpn router now