diff --git a/src/en/nineanime/build.gradle b/src/en/nineanime/build.gradle
index eb19cdb85..96f30eb62 100644
--- a/src/en/nineanime/build.gradle
+++ b/src/en/nineanime/build.gradle
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ ext {
     appName = 'Tachiyomi: NineAnime'
     pkgNameSuffix = 'en.nineanime'
     extClass = '.NineAnime'
-    extVersionCode = 2
+    extVersionCode = 3
     libVersion = '1.2'
 }
 
diff --git a/src/en/nineanime/src/eu/kanade/tachiyomi/extension/en/nineanime/NineAnime.kt b/src/en/nineanime/src/eu/kanade/tachiyomi/extension/en/nineanime/NineAnime.kt
index 17171cefa..53ee97531 100644
--- a/src/en/nineanime/src/eu/kanade/tachiyomi/extension/en/nineanime/NineAnime.kt
+++ b/src/en/nineanime/src/eu/kanade/tachiyomi/extension/en/nineanime/NineAnime.kt
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@ import java.text.ParseException
 import java.text.SimpleDateFormat
 import java.util.Calendar
 import java.util.Locale
+import okhttp3.Headers
 import okhttp3.OkHttpClient
 import okhttp3.Request
 import org.jsoup.nodes.Document
@@ -30,6 +31,11 @@ class NineAnime : ParsedHttpSource() {
         .followRedirects(true)
         .build()
 
+    // not necessary for normal usage but added in an attempt to fix usage with VPN (see #3476)
+    override fun headersBuilder(): Headers.Builder = Headers.Builder()
+        .add("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/77")
+        .add("Accept-Language", "en-US,en;q=0.5")
+
     // Popular
 
     override fun popularMangaRequest(page: Int): Request {