first of all, sorry for bad english. so, my question is: i was looking about my anti virus and i saw that my VPN are being used in a country in Europe. but i’m from South America. what does it mean it? Someone is using my VPN? Is that legal, dangerous? i dont now what that means.
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VPNs can be located in another country. A VPN is meant to route your Internet traffic through an intermediary server, and your location will reflect wherever that server is located.
“VPN is in another country” is ambiguous without more context, it could mean one of several things:
- The VPN endpoint you are connected to physically resides in another country.
- The VPN endpoint you are connected to has an IP address that geolocates to another country.
- The VPN provider you use has its business registered and/or its headquarters located in another country.
If this is something being reported by some software or service, it’s most likely number 2. 1 is typically tied to 2, but not always, IP geolocation can be wrong. 3 doesn’t matter all that much for customers, it’s mainly a business operations/tax thing.
It almost certainly does not mean your VPN account is being used by someone in another country. An antivirus would not be able to determine that. Your VPN provider might display audit logs so you can see when your account has been logged in to, and possibly from where. Those features depend on the provider. But that info is not accessible to an antivirus tool.
Assuming that it is number 2, it’s not a concern. One of the selling points of VPNs to regular internet users is that the VPN will make it seem like you are in another country, as far as the online services you use can tell. This is mainly used for things like bypassing regional restrictions for things like streaming services. Most VPN providers offer you the option of choosing which region to connect to. Lots of users will be connected to the same VPN endpoint, but their traffic is isolated from each other.
So it’s not dangerous, it is in fact one of the main reasons for using a VPN (with the other reasons being “privacy” and “security”, which are mostly just marketing lies).
Whether it’s legal is a grey area. It’s probably not a crime. But many of the online services you use have terms of service that, essentially, require you not to lie to them about where you are. Violating these terms can sometimes lead to various penalties, typically having your account suspended or terminated.