TL;DR Mullvad, Windscribe and IVPN are the only ones not spoofing your location.
“A large-scale analysis of 20 popular VPNs, IPinfo found that 17 of those VPNs exit traffic from different countries than they claim. Some claim 100+ countries, but many of them point to the same handful of physical data centers in the US or Europe.
That means the majority of VPN providers we analyzed don’t route your traffic via the countries they claim to, and they claim many more countries than they actually support.
Analyzing over 150,000 exit IPs across 137 possible exit countries, and comparing what providers claim to what IPinfo measures, shows that:
17 in 20 providers had traffic exiting in a different country.
38 countries were “virtual-only” in our dataset (claimed by at least one provider, but never observed as the actual traffic exit country for any provider we tested).
We were only able to verify all provider announced locations for 3 providers out of the 20.
Across ~150,000 VPN exit IPs tested, ProbeNet, our internet measurement platform, detected roughly 8,000 cases where widely-used IP datasets placed the server in the wrong country — sometimes thousands of kilometers off.
This report walks through what we saw across VPN and IP data providers, provides a closer look at two particularly interesting countries, explores why measurement-based IP data matters if you care where your traffic really goes, and shares how we ran the investigation.”
