Dynamic IP Address Help

Wimdon

Are Dynamic IP Addresses restricted to a certain area within a country or do they cover the whole country? For example is it possible for someone in London to have the same Dynamic IP Address as a user in Manchester? Or can the Dynamic IP address only be shared by users within say London (& then a separate list of IP Addresses used by users in Manchester)?

We believe we unearthed cyber-fraud at work, we have a customer with a home address in the north of the UK but their IP address is in the South, they are claiming the use of a Dynamic IP address is the reason.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

WTFH

Dynamic IP addresses are dynamic.
They are also unique within a domain, and are not country specific.

Also, if the person was connected on to a work computer, it's entirely possible that their IP address could be almost anywhere in the world. I have a laptop beside me which is connected to a server in Ireland. That server is connected to one in Belgium, which in turn is connected to one in the US. If you were to look at the route that my computer takes to get to the internet, it's quite complex. Also, it's behind a few firewalls.

So, perhaps you need to brush up on your understanding of IP addresses before claiming fraud.

...also, as a simpler example, the ISP they are using may have a range of IP addresses. 227.135.1.10 might be in London and 227.135.1.11 could be in Glasgow.

Would you like to tell us the first 3 sets of digits on their IP address?

Cycrow

It depends on the ISP, the range of ip's will be assigned to a specific hub, and then everyone connecting to that will get an ip within that range. So it really depends where the users are connecting to, usually it'll be a local one, but not always, especially with small ISP's that may not have that many hubs to connect to

The bigger the ISP the less likely it'll happen

of course, any mobile isp, will not have any location specific ip's

S0litaire

the IP is linked to the company or organisation that bought the "address Range".

For example : I'm with BT and I live on the West Coast of Scotland near Glasgow and according to some of the "speed tests" websites I'm located in BT's London Fibre Hub. Other times I've been listed as near Edinburgh or Manchester.

Ideally if someone is running a business they should get a Fixed IP address from their ISP (if possible, it may involve extra ££) that way Cyber fraud and unauthorized access is more easily spotted.

Mulder00

Wimdon wrote: »

We believe we unearthed cyber-fraud at work, we have a customer with a home address in the north of the UK but their IP address is in the South, they are claiming the use of a Dynamic IP address is the reason.

IP addresses shouldn't be used to validate user locations. It might be helpful to point you to a user's location, but it's not exact and you could get a lot of false positives.

In fact, my laptop's IP address points to Rochdale, Manchester, but my physical location is somewhere in London.

IP addresses should not be used as GPS co-ordinates.

Uxb

My dynamic IP address currently says London.
I'm not there - I'm more central UK
I suspect it is because my ISP's connection "terminates" in London

paddyrg

Different geo-location systems also come up with different guesses as to the location from the IP - some place me in London, some Manchester, but I'm in Bristol. It means nothing. CERTAINLY cannot prove fraud.

System

For broadband the location provided by an IP address will normally be the location of the ISP or one of their main termination points.

For example. I am with Zen. My IP address location says that I am in Rochdale - Zen's headquarters and not my actual location (about 150 miles away)