As several you might heard, Skype is offering free calls to landlines and cell phones to the US, BUT, this service is just oriented for US/Canada residents. People should be asking, how they detect the origin of the user? Well the question resides on the IP address. There are several companies that specialies on having a map of which ip addresses belong to which countries.
The idea in here is to try to trick Skype servers where are you located.
In order to acheive so heres what you need:
- Personal firewall with advanced firewall blocking (in my case I used Sunbelt Kerio).
- A working Socks proxy located in the US (preferrly Socks V5, and with good connection/latency, could check some free socks proxy lists on google and some might work for it)
- Any version of Skype
Skype did some tricks on their program to prevent from this:
1) If servers are reachable without using the socks proxy configured, it wont use the Socks server configured
2) If you try to encapsulate the app with applications like SocksCap or ProxyCap it simply wont work
The idea in here would to block all traffic from skype.exe to ANY ip address, and just make it allow traffic to the socks proxy.
So this guide will help you to get you up and working with your free calls to US
1) Install Kerio Firewall.
2) Install Skype
3) Configure Skype
Go to Tools-> Options -> Connections
Fill out the form with your socks proxy, save and close skype.
4) Configuration of Kerio:
Open the Kerio Windows, click on the ‘Network Security’ tab. Search in the ‘Application’ table from the right ‘Any other application’ and change it to ask for permission for ‘Internet connection’, and permit traffic out to trusted areas.
Next you should create a ‘Trusted area’, this is for letting all the traffic that goes to the Socks Proxy pass thru the firewall. On the adapter select which adapter you are using to connect to the internet, Address Type, select ‘IP address/range’ and in the following 2 boxes put the socks proxy ip address. Click ok and that should be all the configuration required on Kerio.
5) Fire up skype.exe again, this time it wont be able to connect rather than using the socks proxy. Try dialing a US number and it should be working smile.png
