GoKawiilJul 22, 2026
US residential proxies are the bane of the internet. They’re the major source of social media manipulation and spam. A residential proxy runs someone else’s traffic through a real home internet connection, so it looks like a normal person on Comcast or AT&T. Almost no one intentionally runs one on behalf of bad actors, they’ve been tricked or hacked. Usually it’s one of a few things:
A free VPN app reselling your bandwidth.
A proxy SDK buried in some free game.
Malware on a computer, router, or smart TV.
LG recently moved to ban proxy apps from its smart TVs after researchers found that over 42% of its apps could covertly turn your TV into a proxy.
Internet services (including social media apps) can dramatically reduce abuse by blocking entire IP ranges based on country of origin, organization, or type (hosting providers). But a company can’t block US residential IPs if it would also cut off many of their real users. This is why bad actors love US residential proxies, their abuse comes from the same addresses as genuine users.
There’s a whole industry of “threat intelligence” companies that track IPs and sell this information for a lot of money. It’s readily available if you pay for it (and they could just report abuse to internet providers), but there are obviously perverse incentives here, since significantly reducing the problem would reduce their value.
The US government (probably the NSA) should be cracking down hard on US residential proxy networks. They’re a genuine national security threat:
Actual data and identity loss of American citizens.
... continue reading