You’re going to get caught. Nearly every company anywhere buys software that tracks edge router connections to watch for penetrations. You will get caught. Lying to your employer is a career limiting move (CLM).
The posts that suggest being forthright with your employer about relocating home and kids in school are on point. “Not our problem” is a perfectly reasonable reaction on their part to someone who moved without advance coordination.
Kids change schools or move all the time. I’m unsure why that makes returning “impossible.”Difficult, undesired outcome? Sure. But not impossible. If you’re a digital nomad then isn’t moving semi regularly part and parcel? You’re taking a huge risk directly disobeying. You’d be better off requesting a specified time frame rather than lying about it. “I don’t want to deal with moving my kids during the school year” isn’t a valid reason why you can’t. You had to know when you went out of the country this was a possible outcome you should have prepared for. It really comes down to whether you’re willing to take the gamble over being fired or not. But to your question, yes, if they actually look they will be able to tell.
Ask a friend to set up an open VPN server on a computer in your old city, then connect the router to that. It will show its from a residential location
Worked for my friend while we did a month long road trip through the Pyrenees. Technically he wasn’t allowed to log into anything outside America and everything worked. Now, during his one on one’s they all kinda guessed he’s remote
There’s no cancelling of VPN tunnels except on mobile where you could only have one active profile running. To explain it a different way, your router has an always on connection, your laptop connects to it, you enable your work VPN using the router, follow me so far? Entry into the VPN at your corporate office will disclose the routers VPN IP.
Do a couple of DNS leaks and VPN tests or simply run curl ipinfo.io in both connected/disconnected VPN states.
It’s a lot easier than you think, set conditional access policies up to deny access from any country not whitelisted. This is how we maintain our Geo Fencing for our remote employees.
His proposed solution would mask his location from something like this for the most part, but if his router VPN ever disconnected, then there would immediately be a string of failed login attempts due to location.
If his employer already reached out to OP about his location, then there is a GOOD chance that this would be noticed, and potentially acted upon depending on the company policy.
Where I work, if they could show he lied about his working location, he would be unemployed immediately.
Exactly. I’ve heard stories about companies knowing about Nord and express and other commercial VPNs and cross-checking the IP addresses, but I’ve never actually seen a post from someone saying they got busted for that.
Software Engineer here in networking. The simple answer is as others have stated: if the employer has competent people who care to look, no it will not fool them.