4 ms·

The real scandal is the number of vpns routing traffic over random customers networks…

• walrus01 5y ago
  yes if you google "Residential proxies for sale" there's a whole slew of grey/black market things using peoples' trojaned home routers or home PCs as relays. IP traffic from legit seeming residential IP space is important in circumventing all sorts of things for not only scraping, but also straight out credit card fraud and other more nefarious purposes.
  • mopsi 5y ago
    I have a similar experience. A friend of mine was staying on SE Asia for an extended period of time and asked me to configure her router with an always-on VPN connection to the US to access her media subscription services. She had already signed up with a VPN provider. None of the standard VPN connection types worked (OpenVPN, L2TP etc) with Netflix, only the custom application that they provided. When I analyzed it, I found out that it routed traffic through other users' residential connections.
  • kbenson 5y ago
    It's not all trojaned home routers and PCs, at least not in the sense that the user is unaware that they're running the program (even if they're unaware they're routing traffic). For example, all/most the mobile IPs offered done through offering SDKs for app developers to implement and paying them based on usage. Now that phone is a relay while that app is running/backgrounded. Those free apps don't just make money off of ads, they make money this way too. For those, it's probably in the fine print what's going on, but people are conditioned to trade something non-monetary for usage these days, even if they aren't really aware of what they're trading.