How To Find Someone’s IP Address in 2025: Complete Guide

Whatever’s making you find someone’s IP, the important thing is making sure you do so without crossing lines or breaking laws.

In this article, I make sure you achieve both goals.

And the good news is that you don’t even need fancy spy tools or a skill set to find out someone’s public IP. 

You simply need DIY methods and a sense of where the legal and ethical boundaries sit. 

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get someone’s IP using multiple tested methods. I’ll also tell you what an IP can and can’t reveal, and how to protect your own IP address.

If you want a straight story with zero scare tactics, keep reading.

Is It Legal To Find Someone’s IP Address?

Let’s find the legality of trying to find someone’s IP address.

Legal Uses of IP Tracking

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to track IPs. And business teams do that all the time.

• Security analysts have to look at source IPs to spot intrusion attempts and block malicious traffic. 

• Marketers review IP-level patterns to understand regions, campaigns, or on-site behavior at an aggregate level.

• Network and app engineers log IPs to troubleshoot outages, rate-limit abusers, and keep infrastructure healthy.

If you are any of these, or similar entities, and want to track IPs for valid business purposes, you’re in safe waters. 

Even for some personal reasons, trying to find someone’s IP is legitimate. But the legality depends on two things mainly: your intent and the means you’re using.

If your use case could identify someone, you need a lawful basis for processing and proper disclosures of that data.

This is because under some privacy laws, such as the GDPR, an IP can qualify as personal data. GDPR says that an IP can identify someone when combined with other information.

For instance, internet service providers have the ability to match an IP to a subscriber. In this case, the IPs under ISPs’ control will be personal data.

Similar to ISPs, any company that can connect an IP to a specific individual must treat IPs as personal data.

Risks and Ethical Concerns

IP tracking becomes risky when you have no good reason to perform it. 

If you’re pulling an address simply out of interest, that could fall under profiling or surveillance, both of which are serious offenses. 

And if you’re using the IP data to intimidate, dox, or enable an attack on its owner, then that is flat-out criminal.

Even if you never contact the person, storing IPs without a clear purpose or retention plan carries a risk of accidental exposure. Not to mention that it can become someone else’s nightmare.

Keep reading to learn what is IP address spoofing.

Methods To Find Someone IP Address

With that understood, let’s show you how to get someone’s IP using the following common methods.

Using Command Line Tools (Direct Connections)

In a peer-to-peer connection, your device communicates directly with the other person’s endpoint. This makes it possible to find the other side’s IP.

A good example of peer-to-peer connection is the Minecraft game, which lets players host ad-hoc, peer-to-peer worlds on their computers. 

If you and a friend join that world, both sides will exchange traffic without a full relay. Also, you can often see the other player’s IP in your active connections list.

Here’s how to get that list.

Open Command Prompt on Windows or Terminal on macOS/Linux and execute the netstat or netstat -n to list active connections.

The “Foreign Address” entries are the remote IPs your machine is communicating with. 

If you’re in a live P2P chat, file share, or game session, the other party’s address can appear there.

You can also use ping or traceroute to map the path to a target you have established an active connection with. This helps confirm that the IP you spotted ties to that session.

Checking Email Headers for IP Data

Emails carry a trail of metadata called headers, and in some cases, those headers include the sender’s public IP. 

To see if your email platform provides this information:

• Open an email you’ve received from the person of interest
• Choose the option labeled “Show original”
• Click “View source,” or “View raw message”
• Inspect the topmost “Received: from” line

If the email platform supports IP tracking, that line will contain an IP address in brackets. 

You may also see an “X-Originating-IP” field in older platforms. If there is no masking by the service, that value is the sender’s IP. 

For example, if a small self-hosted newsletter sends you a note, the first “Received” hop might reveal the mail server’s public IP. You can then input this public IP into an IP lookup to learn the network and rough location.

Using an IP Logging Link

The previous method requires nothing more than the email you already have.

But if you don’t have the person’s email, the next best method is to create a tracking link.

You might already know these link tracking creation services because most of them market themselves as link-shorteners.

Simply go to any of these services and generate a short URL pointing to something genuinely safe and relevant. It could be a news article, a YouTube video, or anything the person actually expects.

Share it with the person of interest with an innocuous-looking message.

When the recipient clicks, the service records the visitor’s IP address, timestamp, basic device details, and often a coarse location.

Analyzing Web Server or Hosting Logs

If you own a website and want a website visitor’s IP, this method is similar to the email method. Why? Because you already have their IP.

You just need to know where to grab the IP from.

Standard access logs on your hosting stack automatically: 

• Record visitor IP addresses
• Request time, requested path (your domain’s pages)
• And a user agent for troubleshooting, performance tuning, security, and other legit reasons

However, just remember good data hygiene.

Don’t combine those IPs with other identifiers beyond your stated purpose, and keep your users informed via a clear privacy notice.

Tracing Activity Through Social Media or Forums

If you’re an admin/moderator of a private online community/forum, your console may contain IP logs of sign-ins/posts.

However, don’t try to stretch this beyond what policies allow.

You should disclose what you collect and avoid tricks to force disclosures.

Using Advanced Tools and Third‑Party Services

It’s true that sometimes the free tricks or quick hacks aren’t enough, and that’s where advanced tools can really help. 

For instance, there are paid lookup services that can give richer details about an IP, like the: 

• Provider
• Network type
• IP protocol
• Or even whether there’s a connection to a proxychain or VPN

Similarly, there are security teams that often need threat-intelligence platforms. Aside from revealing the IP, these platforms also show if the IP has any connection to shady behavior. 

There are also forensics suites that help break down traffic patterns when investigations go deeper. 

Now, keep in mind that these tools come with a price tag, sometimes a hefty one. Another important thing to note here is that they’re not for casual curiosity either. 

You should use them only when you have a real need, and ensure that the need is lawful and justified.

What You Can (and Can’t) Do With an IP Address

If you’re the one figuring out how to find someone’s IP address. Or if you’re worrying about your own IP exposure, this section is for you.

An IP, on its own, doesn’t tell much. The most it can tell you is where a connection likely came from and who provided the internet service.

Here’s more about this.

What You Can Learn From an IP

IP lookups return a city or regional match rather than a street or address. 

That’s enough to answer questions like:

• Is this login consistent with the user’s normal city? Or 
• Why are we getting sign-ups from a region we don’t serve?

The lookup also typically identifies the ISP behind the IP range and reveals the user agent.

What You Cannot Do With Just an IP

As I said above, an IP address doesn’t reveal much. 

It cannot let you in on someone’s:

• Home address
• Identity
• Phone number
• Email address
• Or anything that could enable you to eavesdrop or take over someone’s device or online activity

Extra Tools for IP Lookups and Tracing

Speaking of looking up IPs, here are some free online tools for that:

• BrowserScan
• Ipinfo.io
• IP2Location
• What is my IP
• WHOIS lookup

When and Why Would You Need To Find an IP Address?

These are the common reasons why IP tracking happens on both a business and personal level.

Online Security and Fraud Prevention

Businesses and financial platforms check IP signals to decide if a session looks normal or risky. 

Let’s say there’s a customer who usually checks out from a city in Spain. 

But one random day, not long after the last order, a new order from that customer hits. It comes from an IP geolocated to Southeast Asia using the same card. 

That mismatch is a red flag. It prompts the system to hold the transaction for review instead of shipping a box to a stolen identity. 

The same idea protects account logins. If your bank sees repeated attempts from an unfamiliar region, it can step up authentication or block the source.

Aside from fraud prevention, IPs also help in thwarting cybersecurity attacks.

For example, if your website starts receiving a surge of packets from a set of addresses, that could be DDoS.

Based on this firewall, your firewall can rate-limit or block those IPs to keep latency under control and your site running.

Business and Marketing Purposes

When marketers look for IP addresses, their purpose is to understand where traffic actually comes from. Through IP addresses, they also get to know how regions engage so as to create successful targeted campaigns. 

Without this, they’d have to rely on traditional methods of advertising to entire populations. That too, on all channels, in hopes of attracting potential customers.

While this can get them customers, a large amount of broadcast and budget, by extension, goes to waste.

But when they operate location-based campaigns powered by IPs, their broadcasts are specific to high ROI areas. It requires less ad spend.

Personal Use Cases

There are many situations when you and I may need to look for someone’s IP.

• Gaming: If voice chat starts lagging or rubber-banding occurs, a quick look at connection details often shows your traffic hair-pinning through a distant region. That’s your hint to switch servers or adjust matchmaking to regain stable latency. Community organizers use similar signals to ban repeat griefers by source addresses, cutting off bad behavior without punishing the whole lobby.

• Lost laptop or phone: When a device comes online, it gets an IP by whatever network it joins. Many “find my device” dashboards log that connection to give you a rough sense of where it resurfaced. You can then decide whether to mark it stolen, change account passwords, or share details with local authorities. 

• Health-checking messages and sites: Phishing emails often borrow familiar branding, but the header trail can reveal an origin that doesn’t match the story. Likewise, suppose a small shop claims to operate in your country, yet its IP consistently resolves to overseas. You may think twice before entering card details, won’t you? 
• Finding the secret Wifi user: At home, you may need to find an IP address when your internet bandwidth has been sluggish for some time. You may suspect that someone new might be secretly connected to your wifi. Your router’s admin page may show devices connected from unfamiliar IP addresses. If you spot a stranger on the list, you can change the Wi-Fi password and kick them by blocking their IP.

How Marketers Use IP Addresses for Personalization

While IP is just a string and doesn’t tell much on its own, it still has a high value for businesses. It enables them to make smarter business decisions.

Geo‑Targeting and Location Data

Tracking IP addresses can tell businesses where demand is coming from to help them create highly successful offers. 

For example, if sign-ups spike in a coastal city, a brand might see better returns by adding region-specific shipping options. They can also extend support hours that match local time. 

The best part is that none of this requires learning how to get someone’s IP directly. Standard analytics already surface the location signal in aggregate.

The same location data can help businesses implement strategies like geofencing and geoblocking. 

Webmasters can also use location to improve the site experience.

They can route visitors to the nearest server to reduce their load time. Or they can implement geo-pricing to change product prices and the currency based on users’ location.

Customizing Ads and Content Delivery

Instead of blanketing an entire metro with the same creative, you can target media in neighborhoods that historically respond. 

Catalog mailings and local OOH (out-of-home) follow the same logic.  Send more where foot traffic converts and less where it doesn’t. That saves budget and keeps outreach relevant, which is why it often lifts repeat purchases.

Apart from that:

• Showing prices in the visitor’s local currency
• Preselecting the country and postcode
• And suggesting the nearest pickup point removes friction

Address auto-completion tied to regional data cuts errors and shortens forms. 

It’s small stuff, but across thousands of sessions, it adds up to fewer cart abandons and happier customers.

Content delivery benefits from IP addresses, too. If analytics show that visitors from colder regions engage more with certain bundles, you can swap hero images and headlines for those markets. 

If mobile traffic dominates in commuter suburbs, prioritize lighter pages and quicker paths to pay. 

When a sudden burst of traffic arrives from data-center networks, your ad systems can throttle spend to avoid bot clicks. Bot clicks can chew through a daily budget.

There are endless possibilities.

How To Hide or Protect Your Own IP Address

That was all about how to track an IP address. Now, what if you learned that someone’s trying to find your IP with all the wrong intentions? Your next step should be faking or masking your IP address. 

Here are a number of ways to do that.

Using a VPN for Online Privacy

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) routes your connection through an encrypted tunnel.

At the same time, it replaces your real IP with one of its own public IPs. 

When websites check who’s visiting, all they see is the VPN server. Why? Because that’s where the traffic is routing through and using a different IP address than yours.

That simple swap of IP addresses alone makes it a lot tougher for anyone to connect your browsing habits back to your household.

Proxy Servers and Their Benefits

A proxy is similar to a VPN in that it sits between you and the destination site and masks your IP with one from its pool of IPs. 

However, unlike a VPN that routes your entire traffic through its servers, a proxy’s coverage has a limit. It only routes the traffic of the app or browser tab you have set it up on.

The following are a few use cases when proxies are the better choice:

• You only need IP masking for one tool or workflow.
• You’re testing how a page loads from a specific region without changing system-wide networking.
• You want quick IP rotation for non-sensitive tasks where full encryption isn’t required.

The Tor Network and Anonymous Browsing

Then there’s Tor, short for The Onion Router.

Tor hides your true IP address by bouncing your traffic through multiple volunteer-run nodes and wrapping it in layers of encryption. Each of these nodes only knows the hop before and after it, which makes it almost impossible to piece together your path. Even your ISP won’t succeed in that. 

The Tor Browser also minimizes traces on your device. It avoids persistent history, uses single-session cookies, and has anti-fingerprinting defenses that try to make every user look the same to websites. 

In practice, that means if you’re researching a sensitive topic from a public Wi-Fi network, the site you visit sees a Tor exit node’s IP, not your cafe’s. And when you shut the browser, there’s no history sitting on your laptop afterward.

Dynamic vs. Static IPs Explained

Your ISP either assigns you an IP address that dynamically changes or one that never does.

If it dynamically changes, you get a dynamic IP. It changes usually when your router reconnects or when the lease on that address runs out.

This churn adds a thin layer of obscurity. If an address gets noisy or shows up in a forum post, it’s less likely to remain tied to you for long. 

A static IP, by contrast, stays fixed. It’s great for hosting and remote access because services can always find you. But it also means the same address keeps showing up wherever you go online. 

If privacy is your priority, and in this context it is, you should ask your ISP to assign you a dynamic IP. It is so that no one can profile by linking your online behavior to an IP. 

If you must use a static IP (say, for business connectivity), pair it with a privacy tool like a VPN or Tor. Doing so will enable sites to see the intermediary’s IP instead of your own.

Best Practices for Staying Anonymous Online

Using a VPN, proxy, or Tor is a good start. But you still need to behave in ways that don’t hand your identity back on a platter.

• Mimic human behavior: Actions like perfectly-timed clicks, identical page paths, or zero dwell-time are easy to flag because that simply isn’t human behavior. So if you’re using automated scripts, make sure they vary their browsing pace and interaction patterns. This way, your sessions resemble a real person rather than a script.

• Use residential IPs when appropriate: Traffic that appears to originate from typical home connections is better at mimicking human behavior than data-center IP ranges. Many sites blacklist data-center IPs. So prioritize using residential IPs, no matter if you’re using proxies or VPNs, for activities sensitive to fraud filters. This will help you avoid bans or suspensions.
• Choose elite proxies for stronger cover: Elite (high anonymity) proxies hide both your original IP and the fact you’re using a proxy at all. So go for elite proxies over free transparent or basic proxy types.

Common Questions About IP Addresses

Here are some of the common questions related to the query “how to get someone’s IP” and their brief answers.