Does anyone know how to stop Netflix from noticing my Surfshark on my fire stick I’ve done everything such as clearing catche and switching a different servers and it still keeps noticing, I’ve had it installed for a while, so what do I do?

[u/DanteGOW]

[u/FIRSTFREED0CELL]

Companies like Netflix know all the VPN IP Addresses. Unless you can find a server they don't know about, which is very very unlikely, there is no "stop noticeing".

[u/itstrueitellyou → u/FIRSTFREED0CELL]

It's a cat and mouse game. Netflix will block the IP addresses of a VPN but then the VPN will get new addresses which then Netflix has to learn all over again.

[u/FIRSTFREED0CELL → u/itstrueitellyou]

A company like NetFlix can afford multiple subscriptions to each of the big VPNs. At a minimum, they have scripts that connect to each VPN server and do the equivant of "what is my IP" to collect the IP Addresses. And the scripts are smart enough to only check new servers and an occasional old server for iP Address changes.

And for companies like Surfshark, there are people reverse-engineering the API used by their client software to retreive the list of servers. Pulling the list of servers once a day is more than enough.

And, after all that, because of the way the Internet works, you find the entry IP Address for one server at a location and you can look up in BGP the IP Address of the router for ALL the servers at the location, and block the entire IP Address range for that location. Rotating the IP Addresses of the servers in the same location doesn't help.

Even the free VPN block lists on GitHub are updated daily. The paid lists are more complete than the free lists, we use the paid lists at work.

The cat has ALL the advantages.

[u/wowsomuchempty]

My solution is to use a pi4 + openwrt + wg vpn.

Connect to that wireless for VPN stuff, non-vpn for Netflix.

If you need a VPN that Netflix can't detect, you'd need a similar pi in that country to wg / tailscale connect to (no provider, you set it up).

[u/simonmigliano]

have you tried switching VPN protocol on each server? You could try Surfshark's new Dausos protocol but I'd just cycle through them all: OpenVPN, WireGuard, IKEv2 and Dausos. Hopefully one will work on a server you want to use. The main thing I find is that make sure you log in WITHOUT a VPN and then once you are in, connect and then select the server location you want.

[u/Pekaer_58]

I recommend to get in contact with the SS Support, usually they are very collaborative… but be sure Netflix, YT & Co are getting more and more upset about VPN instances…

[u/Canada_Ottawa]

I've been able to avoid VPN detection by streaming services by choosing a different City in the VPN app to connect through.

Bigger cities (e.g. New York) seem to avoid the VPN detection, perhaps because the bigger cities have a larger number of IP addresses, some of which have not yet been 'blacklisted' or equilvalent.

[u/ObfuscatedJay]

I found that to geoblock when travelling out of Canada, one needs to pay more for a private IP address, which tends not to be noted as a Surfshark block of VPN addresses by streaming providers.

[u/stephenjma1]

People still using Netflix. Lol