Black Friday is upon us again and the sales are in full swing. This is great news for bargain hunters checking out the deals – but cybercriminals and bad actors also take advantage of the season to prey on unsuspecting shoppers. They're hungry for personal data and, importantly, payment details.
Luckily, using a VPN is an easy and effective way to deter these risks. They encrypt your traffic, preventing third-party snooping, and come with handy tools to keep your data out of unsafe hands. However, today's best VPNs can do a whole lot more, like unblocking streaming platforms and finding awesome deals, thanks to a technique called geo-spoofing.
Keep reading, and I'll dig into what geo-spoofing is and how it works, as well as the best VPN Black Friday deals you can grab right now.
How does geo-spoofing work?
By design, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) encrypt your internet traffic to ensure that no one can keep tabs on your online activity. This tech is also a core part of VPN geo-spoofing – which I'll break down into not-too-technical chunks.
All VPNs have a network of servers dotted around the world. When you choose and subscribe to a VPN and download its app, you get access to this global server network.
Among the hundreds or thousands of different servers on offer, you can select a specific one, or (in many cases) click an auto-connect button, which will automatically connect you to the closest or fastest server available. For the sake of this explanation, let's imagine you select a server by yourself.
The Black Friday sales are in full swing – and the TechRadar team are constantly hunting down the biggest and best tech bargains.
Connecting to that server will result in the VPN service hiding your original IP address and assigning you a temporary one based in the same physical location (country/region) as the server you selected.
So, if you're in the UK and connect to a VPN server in the US, the sites, apps, and services you visit will think you're in the States, too, and serve up US-specific content.
This comes in handy around Black Friday – especially if you're searching for the best deals on a website whose domain is registered to a foreign country. You'll be able to see location-specific content (deals, offers, price units, etc.) that you wouldn't have been able to see without a VPN.
But, it gets even better – a secure VPN also comes in handy for unblocking region-specific Netflix shows, censored news outlets, and pretty much any other location-specific online content. So, not only can you save money during the sales, you can also watch your favorite shows, sports games, first-source news, and virtually anything else online with a single VPN subscription.
How to find the best bargains
Now that you know why using one of the best VPNs can help you get the most out of Black Friday weekend, let's look into the how:
- Pick a VPN: given how many VPNs are on the market, this can be a daunting task. Check out our guide to today's best cheap VPNs if you're looking to bag a bargain.
- Subscribe and install the VPN: today's top VPNs make the process a breeze – all you need to do is input your login details and follow along with the install wizard.
- Weigh up your options: next, you'll need to decide which item(s) you're on the hunt for. Then, identify which outlets are listing them for sale.
- Spoof your location: here comes the fun part. Connect to a VPN server overseas, refresh the page, and compare the region-specific prices to the original listing to see if there's a significant difference in price.
The best Black Friday VPN deals
The Black Friday sales extend to VPNs, too, and there are some seriously tantalizing deals on offer this year. Here are 3 of my favorites:
