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I ran into a situation where I left a VPN on my phone on and the Target app (US store Target) would pop up an alert "true".

I assume someone was detecting if you were using a VPN and testing and it somehow made it into production. I emailed them and never heard back.

Granted ... I get why a retailer with financial activity going on might want to know if a VPN was used to possibly apply extra scrutiny to the purchase.

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Target now also has a world class incident response and forensics team setup after their big breach and being nearly every security vendors topic du jour for years. It's entirely reasonable they do this to add to malicious detection signal, or fraud.

Yeah I agree, money and goods are changing hand, it seemed reasonable to do that level of detection.

Yes, Best Buy and many others I'm sure do this as well.

Or used by competitors to see if the prices change depending on network location.

I used to work for a company that explicitly changed the prices on the site if the request traffic came from a competitor IP address.

Of course this was a hundred years ago in a land far away. I don’t know how much success you’d have even finding your competitors IP’s these days.

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