This just occurred to me - as the title says, I wonder how many users with suspended accounts use the relatively new 5G home Internet services like T-Mobile or Verizon? I speculated about this about a year back, causing issues with services that forbid VPNs, because I learned how these work as part of my job. We use Office 365 enterprise accounts, and last year we implemented something called “impossible logins” or “impossible travel” which watches login IPs and blocks logins that “hop” around the globe. This resulted in some students and teachers suddenly having issues logging in at home.
We thought at first that they had VPNs installed, but when that turned out to be wrong, I dug deeper. 5G home Internet works on the same principle as cell towers - it hops a person’s connection around to whichever part of the country is experiencing the lowest traffic. We checked a few of the students with the issue: at school, their logins all checked out. At home, they showed a successful login at their local address, then about 10 minutes later, a blocked attempt in Washington and another in Massachusetts.
Sure enough, all of these users had one of the new 5G home Internet providers, which was working like a built in VPN and couldn’t be turned off. We had to give them district hotspots to use.
Since Rewards has a rule against “confusing your IP address” or using a VPN, I wonder how many of the bans are due to this connection behavior, especially if some aren’t even aware their ISP works this way.
Well I got a mystery ban and lost over 100K last week and I’m on AT&T Fiber home internet with a fairly consistent IP address. I did however discover that my Edge browser on PC updated itself to automatically use a VPN without asking me.
This would actually make sense for me, as we’re on a proxy server at work. We use T-Mobile home Internet at home because our Verizon coverage in the house is horrible.
So I’m logging in from 3 IP addresses: work, T-Mobile home Internet at home, and Verizon when I’m out and about. Or on my phone at work, as it’s not connected to the work network.
We’re in UK My wife got banned 7 months ago for no reason it took it took 4 months of battling with them until they realised it was a system error which caused the blocking. Been going 3 months and she’s blocked again… I’m hoping it won’t be another 5 month battle to get it back… We’re just with BT fibre in UK not a new provider - I think it’s very random, She tried to redeem 2 xbox £10 gift cards originally - the first went through, the second resulted in a temporary restriction, but luckily it was approved the next day, she then went to redeem the final £10 gift card for the game she wanted and then she got a proper ban, and so far no response from support in 3 days.
I’m assuming the ban was triggered by trying to redeem 3 things in a fairly short succession? weirdly it still lets her redeem for sweep stakes.
I have been a T-Mobile customer since 2021, and AT&T cellular before that. (I live in a rural region where AT&T DSL gave me a whopping 3.0 Mbps and capped me at 100 GB of data, so I switched as soon as an alternative was available.) I realize this is anecdotal, but I have never had my location set/detected anywhere outside of a reasonable geographic location for me. Nor have I had any issue with work or play.
Whoa, your Edge is automatically using a VPN? I need to check mine at home, that REALLY shouldn’t happen - was kind of a sneaky thing for them to implement if they forced that on everyone with a backdoor update…
Your anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean that it’s not an issue. It just means it’s not an issue for you in particular. However it is nice to know that you are using Verizon home internet and are not experiencing the issue.
Yeah I found it after someone else mentioned in another thread on this sub. It never would have occurred to me and others said it wasn’t supposed to happen that way but I know didn’t deliberately turn it on. Could have been a pop up I agreed to without paying attention though.