<b>Q: Why do antifraud systems treat data-center IPs as automatically suspicious?</b>

<b>Q: Why do antifraud systems treat data-center IPs as automatically suspicious?</b>

A: Because almost no ordinary person browses from one. The base rate of legitimate consumer traffic from a data center is tiny, so the address type itself is a strong risk signal.

Real buyers connect through residential ISPs (Comcast, Vodafone, your phone carrier) or mobile networks. Data-center IP ranges belong to hosting providers — AWS, OVH, Hetzner — and the things running there are servers: scrapers, bots, headless browsers, and proxy services that resell those addresses.

Antifraud tools maintain IP intelligence databases that label each address by type and ASN (the network operator). A click from a known hosting range gets a higher fraud score before anything else is even checked.

The catch: legitimate users behind a corporate VPN or a privacy VPN can route through data-center IPs too. That's why a good system weighs it alongside other signals rather than hard-blocking. But if a large share of your traffic resolves to hosting ASNs, that's a real problem to trace — usually a bad placement, a bot-infested source, or a vendor reselling proxy traffic.

Short version: consumers don't browse from servers. Data-center IPs carry risk by default — audit any source where they're common.

Still stuck? Drop your case in the comments.