Free IP lookup
Check any IP address for VPN, proxy, Tor and datacenter use, with country, city and network operator. No signup. Your own address is loaded below to start.
Same check from your code
The API returns everything above plus the reputation signals this page holds back — whether the address has been reported for abuse, when it was first seen across the network, and how many customers have flagged it.
curl "https://www.layercall.com/v1/score/ip?ip=8.8.8.8" \
-H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY"1,000 lookups a month free, no card. Get a key or read the docs.
What each signal means
VPN
The address belongs to a commercial VPN provider.
Most VPN users are legitimate — privacy-conscious people, remote workers, travellers. Treat it as one input, not a reason to block. Blocking every VPN is the single most common false-positive complaint about fraud tools.
Proxy
Traffic is being relayed through an open, residential or rotating proxy.
Much stronger than VPN. Residential proxy networks exist largely to make automated traffic look human, so this correlates closely with scraping, credential stuffing and fake signups.
Datacenter
The IP is hosted infrastructure — AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcean and the like — rather than a consumer ISP.
Real people rarely browse from a server. Harmless for API and server-to-server traffic; suspicious on a consumer signup form.
Tor
The address is a known Tor exit node.
The strongest anonymiser. Legitimate uses exist, but the ratio of fraud to genuine traffic is high enough that most services challenge rather than allow.
Questions
Is this IP lookup free?
Yes — no signup, no card. There is an hourly limit per visitor so the tool stays available to everyone. For higher volume or programmatic access, a free API key gives you 1,000 lookups a month.
How accurate is VPN and proxy detection?
Detection combines datacenter ASN ranges, published VPN and proxy ranges, live Tor exit-node feeds, and reputation gathered across the LayerCall network. No detector is perfect — treat the score as a strong signal, not proof, and pair it with your own behavioural data.
What does the risk score mean?
0 is clean and 100 is near-certain abuse. Roughly: under 30 allow, 30–70 worth a second look, above 70 block or challenge. The API returns a verdict of allow, review or block so you do not have to pick thresholds yourself.
Do you log the addresses I look up?
Lookups are counted for rate limiting and cached briefly for speed. The tool is not a way for us to build a profile of you — see our Privacy Policy.
Can I use this in my own application?
Not this endpoint — it is rate-limited for the tool. The API behind it is at /v1/score/ip, returns the full signal set including abuse reputation, and is free for the first 1,000 lookups a month.