Looking for a replacement for PIA. My major pain points

VPN
1

I’ve been using PIA for a while now but there are some bad consequences that I’m seeing now. Just to name a few:

  1. Google makes me solve Captcha for pretty much every single one of their services. Which is quite annoying. Just clicking a link from my gmail makes them show a captcha.

  2. Other services are starting to do it too. I have to constantly verify or confirm my accounts. For no apparent reason other than using PIA VPN.

  3. I posted a review on TrustPilot and they flagged it as “being suspicious”. My guess - because of the IP where it came from.

  4. Any e-commerce site requires double the amount of verification. Like any purchase with my credit card requires an annoying Visa verification. It never happens if I use my home IP in the U.S. Btw all this happens because most e-commerce sites use services like Sift to rate the IP address that the request comes from. And evidently PIA’s ips suck.

So question. Do you guys know any VPN providers that don’t suffer from the issues that I named above?

2

To get around the captcha, I use duckduckgo. No issues then.

3

Technically it’s not the VPN’s fault, it’s all the other systems detecting the VPN. You’ll probably have the same issue with another provider.

4

All VPNs have this issues, not always but once the IP is flagged everyone using that IP will need to solve Captchas.

If you want to avoid them you’ll most likely need to look into self hosting your own VPN look at residential IPs to avoid being flagged.

5

The solution is to not use a VPN for things you don’t need it for, like casual browsing. Use split tunneling and VPN the things that need it and not others.

6

You are going to run into the captcha nightmare with any vpn when dealing with google… you should use DUCKDUCKGO for a search engine and your captcha issues will be resolved.

You have a really, really good vpn… google is just crappy to deal with… try DuckDuckGo

7

Same CAPTCHA problem with SurfShark. It’s a Google issue, they do it almost every VPN.

8

You could get a dedicated ip on PIA. Should fix the problems but then you’re reducing your security/privacy on the vpn

9

Are you using their dedicated ip service or regular?

10

I never get captcha requests when using the browser extension, only the windows application.

So I only use the browser extension.

11

I’ve got the uBlock origin extension in Chrome. Ever since I installed it the captcha’s that Pop Up for PIA only need me to check a box n’ I’m done!

Dunno If it helps at all but, good luck!

12

The problem you described is common even for other VPN, unless you have a dedicated IP. Then the problem becomes if a site uses reverse DNS lookup to verify your identity. Which also affects any companies that buy their IP addresses at data centers.

13

The only way to be sure is roll your own. OVH has sub $10/mo private VPS servers with public IPs. Buy one and setup Wiregard/OpenVPN if you’re simply looking for that aspect of a VPN. Of course, if you’re looking for the aspect of being able to change your IP all the time that won’t work.

14

All VPNs have captcha. PIA has the best low latency servers hand down in the USA.

15

In my experience this happens because the services are blocking vpn ips, not because of pia specifically.

Why? they want to fingerprint your whole internet usage to sell it to someone else.
I was disconnected from spotify 2 times in less than an hour for “suspicious activity”.

Google recaptcha is notorious for looping when using any kind of vpn, it happened to me on Nord and one more I can’t remember. I’ve had luck changing servers.

I own an e-commerce company, and at least our back end flags them as “moderate” on the scam analysis, because the ip doesn’t match with the address, so it might be to verify who you are. (still dumb and a pain in the ass, It happened to me a few weeks ago)

This is my experience, but if you want to stop using PIA, go for it, trying other services is good

Can’t really recommend because all vpns i’ve used had the same issues

16

PIA gets abused by scammers and bots because it’s well known and cheap, and then accumulates low trust scores on its IPs.

Seek out a more niche VPN that is significantly more expensive and you will have much less issues with these things. Or, roll your own on a VPS.

17

May I ask why you feel the need to enable the VPN for using google, e-commerce and bank sites? If you are logged in, your activity is monitored and tracked regardless of what your current IP is. I only flip the VPN on when I want to go private and not logging in anywhere, then flip it back off when I’m done. I never get a captcha or have any other issues whatsoever.

18

I have encountered the same issue with PIA. I prefer using the Brave search engine. Some people claim that this issue occurs while using a VPN, but that’s not true. You can verify this by checking Windscribe, which offers 3GB for free and doesn’t prompt any captchas.

19

Unless you have a dedicated IP or a small number of users on your VPN endpoint they’re all going to do this.

Try it out if you like though.

PIA offer a dedicated IP address if you’re willing to $

Old abused IPs still get flagged sometimes and then get recycled, even by legitimate ISPs.

 

Your best bet is to lease a VPS and DIY a VPN on that.

20

But PIA’s dedicated IP