So Mickey T, you mean, either a whats my IP search or return from IP Cloud will return a private IP??
No, a What's My IP lookup will return the Internet accessible IPv4 address. The problem is that the IP will be shared between multiple customers and CG-NAT (
Carrier-Grade NAT) means that your router will be given a private IP address and the ISP will route the traffic as appropriate (when it works properly - UDP packets can have trouble with CG-NAT).
The simple scenario (this is how my ISP does it) is: ISP's internet IP (Internet accessible) <--> CG-NAT Router Private IP range (e.g.: 172.18.0.0/24) <--> My router's External IP (anything in the 172.18.0.0/24 range in this example. e.g.: 172.18.0.23) <--> My router's internal IP range (e.g.: 192.168.0.0/24)
So the What's My IP will show the ISP's Internet IP but not the IP assigned to the customer router (e.g.: 172.18.0.23). You can check for yourself by logging in to your router and looking at the IP assigned to you by your ISP. If it's in either the 10.0.0.0/8 or 172.16.0.0/12 range (they don't tend to use the 192.168.0.0/16 range because it's too small) then your ISP will be using CG-NAT (or something similar).
CG-NAT was used a lot by mobile/cellular broadband services when they first became available. Now CG-NAT is used because the supply of IPv4 addresses is running out (has run out?) and, also, because ISPs have put a lot of time and money in to getting it setup so aren't ready to move away from it just yet.