For visitors who have been blocked
“Access via proxy/VPN/Tor is not permitted” — what it means
You tried to visit a website and got a message like this instead of the page. You are almost certainly not in trouble, and in most cases you can fix it yourself in under a minute. Here is what happened and what to do.
First, the important part: we cannot unblock you
Predax makes the screening software that some websites use, but we do not run those websites and we do not decide who they let in. Every site owner sets their own rules, and only they can change them or make an exception for you. If the steps below do not work, contact the website you were trying to reach, not us. Emailing Predax cannot restore your access to somebody else’s site.
What the message actually means
Every device on the internet has a public address, in the same way a house has a postcode. It is given to you by your internet provider, your mobile network, or whatever service you are connecting through, and websites can see it.
Some websites check that address before showing you a page — usually to keep out automated traffic, spam, card fraud or repeated login attempts. The check asks a fairly narrow question: does this address look like it belongs to a home or a phone, or does it look like it belongs to a data centre, a VPN provider, or an anonymity network?
The message you saw means the answer came back “not a normal home connection”. It is a statement about the address you happen to be using right now. It is not an accusation about you, it is not tied to your name or your account, and it is not permanent.
Why this happens to people who have done nothing wrong
A blocked visitor is usually one of these, and none of them involve wrongdoing.
A VPN — including one built into your browser
This is by far the most common cause. Opera, Brave and Microsoft Edge all ship with a VPN or "secure network" feature that can be switched on without you thinking of it as a VPN. Antivirus suites often bundle one too. If any of these are active, the website sees the VPN company's address instead of yours.
iCloud Private Relay
If you use Safari on an iPhone, iPad or Mac with iCloud+, Private Relay routes your browsing through Apple's servers. It is not a VPN exactly, but to a website it looks similar enough that some filters treat it the same way.
A work, school or university network
Large organisations send everyone's traffic out through a handful of shared gateways. If one person on that network misbehaved, or if the gateway simply looks like a data centre rather than a home, everyone behind it can be caught by the same rule.
Mobile data and carrier-grade NAT
Mobile networks share a single public address between thousands of customers at once. Your phone can be given an address that somebody else was using an hour ago, and whatever they did is attached to it.
A recycled address from your home broadband
Home internet providers hand out addresses from a pool and reuse them constantly. The address you were given today may have belonged to someone whose computer was sending spam last week. Nothing about this is your fault, and nothing about it is permanent.
A false positive, plainly
No screening system is perfect. Some addresses are misfiled in the underlying data as belonging to a hosting company when they are ordinary home connections. Sometimes the site owner has simply set their rules stricter than they intended.
What to do, in order
Work down the list and re-try the site after each step. Stop as soon as it loads.
- 1
Turn off any VPN or private relay, then reload
Check your VPN app first. Then check the browser itself — Opera, Brave and Edge all include a built-in VPN or "secure network" feature that is easy to leave switched on by accident. Look through your browser settings for anything named VPN, secure network or private connection. On Apple devices, also check whether iCloud Private Relay is turned on in your iCloud settings.
- 2
Swap between wifi and mobile data
On a phone, turn wifi off so you are on mobile data — or turn wifi on if you were on mobile data. That gives you a completely different address on a completely different network, and it takes ten seconds. If the site loads on one and not the other, you have found the problem.
- 3
Restart your router
Unplug your home router, wait roughly a minute, plug it back in. Many providers will hand you a different address when it reconnects, which quietly clears the problem if it was caused by the previous occupant of your old address. It does not always work — some providers keep you on the same address — but it costs nothing to try.
- 4
Try a different device on the same network
If a second device is blocked too, the issue is your connection rather than your browser. If the second device works, clear your browser cache or try a private window — an extension or a cached page can be involved.
- 5
Contact the website itself
If none of the above works, the site owner is the only person who can let you back in. Look for a contact form, a support email, or their social media. Tell them the page you were trying to reach, roughly when it happened, and that you saw a message about proxies or VPNs. Most owners will add an exception once they know a real customer was affected.
One thing we will not tell you to do
Other pages about this message will suggest buying a “cleaner” or “residential” proxy so the site cannot tell. That advice exists because those pages earn a commission on the sale. It is also poor advice: the block happened precisely because your traffic looked like it was coming through an intermediary, and paying for a different intermediary is as likely to make things worse as better. Turning the intermediary off is the fix.
Want to see what websites see when you connect?
You can check your own address and whether it currently looks like a VPN, a proxy or a data centre. It is free, it needs no account, and it is often the quickest way to confirm that a step above has worked.
Checking here does not change anything on the site that blocked you, and it does not send them a request on your behalf. It only tells you how your connection currently looks.
If you run the website
If you landed here because your own visitors are seeing this message, the honest answer is that blocking every VPN and proxy outright will cost you real customers. A meaningful share of ordinary traffic arrives through a browser VPN, iCloud Private Relay or a corporate gateway, and a flat rule cannot tell those apart from an attacker.
A better setup treats the connection as one signal among several: screen it, score it, and only block outright when the score is high or the behaviour is bad — challenge or review the rest. That is what Predax is built to do, and it is why this page exists rather than a page selling you a bigger blocklist.