Have an Android phone “Redmi 9” with the latest surfshark app. I connected to Seattle USA VPN on automatic protocol which chose wireguard. After connected, I got to surfshark.com/check and it’s still showing my wifi IP address in my guest country outside the USA.
I contacted support to see what was up. They suggested I go into Surfshark settings and change the VPN protocol to OpenVPN UDP, which then worked properly.
I am making this post as a warning for those who thing they are safe, protected, and secure, per the app saying so, but in reality you are not.
It is vitally important you verify your VPN connection independently either by your own tools or using their /check website tool before you go off browsing thinking that your IP is hidden.
It’s rather bullshit. They need to fix that immediately.
Hey there, thank you for bringing this up. I can see that another member already answered this quite well, however, I just wanted to add something.
We are always working to make sure issues like these occur as rarely as possible. However, there are indeed different factors that can’t always be accounted for just on our side, hence why sometimes, changes on your device or within our app are necessary.
If you’d like to discuss this further or want more information/help with your issues, feel free to reach out at [email protected].
It’s not always as easy as coding and fixing. You need to understand that certain OS features and browsers still can/may leak info outside your VPN tunnel.
A common issue is WebRTC leaking, which can happen because of the way WebRTC tech establishes direct peer-to-peer connections. Another reason is the native system connectivity checks in Android, which may leak some traffic even when ‘always-on VPN’ is enabled. Lastly, DNS traffic can also leak outside the VPN tunnel. These issues are primarily due to Android’s operating system design and cannot always be fully prevented by the VPN app alone.
It may be worth investigating or changing to privacy browsers, cleaning cookies, cache and sessions on a regular basis, etc.
I have been using SS for about 2 years now and besides some relatively minor quirks at times, it performs stable and safe for most of the time. When I compare this to my other VPN’s (yes, I use different brands), can’t say one performs perfectly all the time.
Same issue here, happened on 3 different devices each with different OS. Confirmed using Surfsharks own ‘whats my ip’ pages. Only the DNS was connected correctly, IP and WebRTC not masked. Turning off all VPN additional settings (cleanweb, no borders, etc) seemed to fix it for me. Popped them back on and no issues since.
I use vpn for accessing geo-blocked media but very thankful thats all. Hope no one gets burned.