A residential proxy routes traffic through a household internet address so the source looks like a home user to the site.
The website sees an ordinary home connection rather than a data center, which complicates simple address reputation.
How it works
Providers pool many household connections and rent the exit to customers who want that appearance.
The household may have installed a SDK, joined a service, or lost control of a device, so consent is not always obvious to the site.
Scraping, fake accounts, and checkout automation hide more easily behind these addresses than behind a known hosting range.
This page is about household exit addresses in general, not a long lived assigned home address product and not a mobile carrier path.
Concrete examples
- A price collector rotates through home addresses and never shows a hosting network in the log.
- A signup flood arrives from many cities, each address belonging to a consumer connection.
- A household complains that its connection is busy because a device is relaying strangers traffic.
Protective measures
- Do not treat a home address as proof of a human, and combine address type with behavior and account signals.
- Rate limit and add computation cost where catalog, login, and checkout traffic looks scripted.
- Investigate sudden traffic from consumer networks that walks your site in identifier order.
- Prefer partners who can explain consent, and block networks that ignore abuse reports about relayed traffic.