Can you be traced through skype

You can make and receive voice, video and text messages from anywhere in the world using Skype. Any two computers or mobile devices connected to the Skype network can connect. Skype only displays the username of the person on the other end of the call, providing you with no way of determining where the call originate from.

There could be many reasons why you might want to trace a call made via Skype such as harassing messages or trying to find a missing family member.

By using your computer's command prompt and some online tools, you can determine a caller's IP address' physical location. In the Start menu or at the Start screen type "cmd" into the search box and press "Enter," which should launch the Command Prompt window.

A better way would be to use wireshark to monitor your traffic and look for skype protocols. It is however very limited what kind of thread this might be to you. Every Skype client can in fact become such a proxy node if the network reachability is good, especially in regard to firewall conditions. In the latter case you have no way of finding out the call partners real IP address. I never figured out how it really works, but as summary: I would not rely on the fact that there can be proxied transmissions.

Rather consider that you expose your IP to the chat partner. Another way to determine the ip addresses of callers would be to look at the forensic artifacts.

There are a few tools out there that will analyze the artifacts for you but you could determine all of what you need yourself. This article describes the process pretty well, but basically, all you are looking for is in the 'shared.

This method is pretty cool because forensically, you can determine who connected and to whom after the fact and potentially even if a suspect has deleted the skype program altogether. Alternatively, you can of course do what Kristoffer suggests but that really only captures active connections and unless you saved the logs, there is no way to do a post-mortem so to speak. As an aside, just knowing an end user's IP address doesnt necessarily tell you where the user is. The easiest way to spoof this would be to use a VPN which will still give your examination an IP address but that would not be the IP of the user.

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