VPN usage is no longer unusual.
Around 23% of internet users worldwide use a VPN for at least some of their online activity. Usage reaches roughly 25% in the US and UK, with hundreds of millions of people globally able to change the country their IP address appears to come from.
That creates a very specific problem for advertisers.
A person outside your target country can connect through a VPN server inside it, click your ad, and appear to Google, Meta, and your analytics platform like a normal local visitor.
In BotRefund traffic audits, we see up to 12% of paid clicks using VPN, proxy, or similar infrastructure capable of hiding the visitor's real location.
If you're paying $10, $20, or $50 per click, that becomes expensive very quickly.
No credit card required.
A VPN is not a bot. It is a location gap. One person clicks your ad as a real user, the platform sees a local IP, and your budget starts paying for a customer who may be somewhere else.
Your campaign targets the US, UK, Japan, Germany, or another market where a customer has real value.
The click is made by a person—not necessarily a bot. Using a VPN by itself does not automatically make the click invalid. The platform can treat it as a legitimate ad interaction and charge you for it.
The IP can belong to a VPN or proxy exit server inside your target market while the person clicking the ad is physically somewhere else. Your dashboard says United States. Your customer may not be in the United States at all.
When VPN usage reaches more than one billion people worldwide, the problem is no longer one unusual session. It is a repeatable blind spot inside paid traffic that looks local until you join the network, campaign, session, and conversion signals.
We connect VPN, proxy, hosting, geo, browser, network, behavioral, and campaign signals to the exact campaign, click ID, keyword or ad, session, IP and network, conversion behavior, and advertising cost.
BotRefund prepares the evidence and negotiates the invalid-traffic claim with Google or Meta to recover eligible ad spend.
Imagine you're paying $20 per click. You buy 10,000 clicks.
10,000 clicks at $20 per click.
If 12% of those clicks show VPN, proxy, or geographic inconsistencies.
The amount represented by 1,200 clicks at a $20 CPC.
Without additional detection, those clicks can sit inside your campaign looking like ordinary traffic.
BotRefund identifies them, calculates what you paid for them, creates the evidence, and helps you claim the money back from Google or Meta.
We do not simply label an IP as “VPN.” We identify suspicious paid clicks and connect the evidence to the business value of the click.
BotRefund prepares the evidence and negotiates the invalid-traffic claim with Google or Meta to recover eligible ad spend.
VPN, proxy, hosting, browser, IP, geo, and related infrastructure signals connected to the paid session.
The exact campaign, keyword, ad, click identifier, timestamp, landing page, and advertising cost behind the session.
Session behavior, repeat activity, conversion outcomes, and the commercial inconsistencies that make the click worth investigating.
Important: a VPN user is not automatically fraudulent. BotRefund uses the network signal with campaign, behavioral, and commercial evidence so the claim focuses on eligible invalid traffic.
Find out how much of your paid traffic may be using VPN, proxy, or similar infrastructure to hide its real location.
Audit my Google & Meta traffic → Read the research blog