internet ip question?

Question

i am a member of a message board and recently I answered someones post asking where to find authentic gabor silver, well evidently my advice wasn't the best since some guy named frank replied that the person on ebay i recommended was a scammer..then the guy who runs the board (as well as a couple more people)needlessly chimed in, thisis when I noticed that on the side of another thread next to the posts that these posters all had the same ip addy, even the guy running the board! so I publicly asked him about it (now this may be a stupid question but can someone explain why slava, frank, mrs jackson, and mikkimo all have the exact same ip address?) and the guy gave this excuse
"As well as about 100 of other people. Every email I received from this forum comes with exact same IP address.
Carl, can you email me by clicking on my email link below, I want to see if yours comes with this IP address as well ...I just checked with BraveNet they have same forwarding IP address for all users. It was disabled before but with their recent update somehow it was "on" again. By law they are not allowed to show IP addresses of the people posting so they chose to show one forwarding IP address which obviously not always worked. I have notified them of this issue. Thanks Carl for reporting it, they are currently working on fixing it and should be resolved shortly."
now I'm ignorant but I'm not stupid...I didn't ask about email ip addresses, I asked about the live thread and as soon as I called him on the fact the ip addys in the threads disappeared...uh huh, completely reassuring!
I looked through half a dozen or more topics researching the ip addresses before I went and asked about it and none of them all matched like he claimed...am I correct to assume there is no possible way for someone posting a message in japan to have the same ip address as a person posting from nyc ?
I know this guys playing games!
professional opinions welcomed

Answer 1

the answer is very simple, the person who runs the board was trying to make an inactive board look busy.

the ip addresses are switchable by the admin only.

Answer 2

"As well as about 100 of other people" ...or not ! Using a proxy, yes it's possible to have a common one (IP) but it's also possible to have another IP (different from the real) if they are using a "not my IP" program who's giving another IP to the users.Who knows? And then tracking the IP it's giving an error.

Answer 3

If they are both using the same proxy server then they could have the same IP.

Answer 4

Hey man don't stress it! They probably are using the same wifi, and there are bots on internet that you can put in forums that reads off your i.p. address, but only you can see it and not them! :)