Websites are showing my IP address as not in Britain

[DavidB-E]

For the last two days, the National Lottery website won't log me in when i'm using a browser - Firefox or Edge - because it says I'm not in Great Britain according to my IP address, and then notes that if I AM actually in the UK, then my ISP has messed up and not registered or renewed the geolocation of the IP addresses it's handing out.

This would appear to be connected with a couple of emails from Paypal, on making a purchase, saying I'm on a machine it hasn't seen before - not uncommon, probably something to do with expiring cookies, except these last few times it has said I'm somewhere in California rather than the assorted locations somewhere within 50 miles of where I actually am in Wiltshire that are usually shown.

And no, I'm not using a VPN.

While I have been able to access the National Lottery using my phone, as it uses the phone GPS location rather than the browser reported IP address to confirm I'm in the UK, I would very much like to get back to websites correctly locating me from my IP address. TalkTalk - please sort this out.

[Michelle-TalkTalk]

Morning,

Thanks for the update 🙂

Thanks

[DavidB-E]

Ah, found the problem. Early this year I changed from Kaspersky to Norton360, never having used Norton before. I saw it came with a VPN, but very explicitly set the VPN to OFF. I've just found It had become turned on, and now i think about it there was an update to Norton360 a few days ago. When it updated it must have reconfigured itself to the auto-VPN on connect setting, as I most certainly never opened the VPN configuration settings to change them (or indeed any of the settings for months). Turned it off, and my public IP and associated ISP and location are back to normal.

Changing its own settings while updating is NOT good, but it's a Norton issue not a TalkTalk one.

[DavidB-E]

WTF?

According to my router, my public IP address is 88.109.3.220, but I just went to iplocation.net to see what location that gave, and according to that my public IP Address is actually 18.144.66.19, with my ISP being Amazon.com with a location of San Francisco California! If I type in what my router says my public ip address is, then it correctly says my ISP is TalkTalk, with a location of Southampton (or various other towns/cities depending on lookup service) England.

Where's this Amazon.com public IP address coming from? What's changing it?

[Skynet_TX]

Hi @DavidB-E,

Try switching your router off for over 30 minutes, this will ensure you get a brand new session when you switch it back on, this might help, but if not, the support team here will be able to help more tomorrow.