r/ProxyUseCases

Ok so this is gonna be a bit of a ramble but I need y'all to hear this. I work adjacent to the scraping/data space (not naming employer, y'all know how it is) and I always kind of just you know, accepted that "residential proxies" were this slightly grey but mostly fine thing. Like yeah obviously somebody's home IP is being used, somebody agreed to something somewhere, moving on. Then yesterday I see netnut is just gone. Not down, not maintenance page, straight up FBI DOJ IRS-CI seizure banner, Google and Lumen and Shadowserver all stamped on it too like it's a whole coalition operation. Like bruh, I have never in my life seen this on any website. So imagine the shocker lol. And I'm sitting there like wait since when did the IRS care about proxy IPs??? Turns out IRS-CI does financial crime investigations and it could be related to that, but still, seeing that logo on a proxy provider's main website??? Diabolical mate.

So I go searching what's going on and apparently it's tied to this thing called the Popa botnet, basically it's been running for like four years hijacking Android TV boxes (remember that Bright Data SDK thingy?? And Krebs traced a chunk of it back to actual NetNut infrastructure through some ex-employee's domain. Not some randoms, an actual former VP of R&D there. Google's own blog post says they think the network was over 2 million devices at one point and that a lot of those "different" proxy brands you see around are just NetNut wearing a different logo through resellers. I swear I seen a post talking about how there is one or two proxy providers sharing those IPs/reselling whatever. Makes sense now, people?? Am I the only one concerned here with a few other nerds? And to be fair I want to be fair here, Alarum (the parent company) came out and started calling it that a botnet is inaccurate, also said that there's real KYC and consent flows and misuse detection on their end. So it's not like this is some minor thing everyone agrees on, it's actively disputed and I think that matters, I'm not trying to just slam a company because Krebs wrote a scary headline, no. Make what you will out of it, but I things are rising to the surface, more and more often. Again it does make me think about how much of the "residential proxy pool" any of us are touching day to day is actually consented in a way a normal person would recognize as consent, versus consented in the "buried in paragraph 14 of an SDK terms screen" way. Like where's the line between legit residential network and just a nicer branded botnet, and how would any of us even know the difference from the outside.

Not trying to start a witch hunt on the whole industry, genuinely just spent my evening reading legal filings and threat intel blogs instead of sleeping like a normal person, but after Bright Data SDK shennanigans and now Netnut, boy, there's gonna be more stuff coming out. So I figured I'd share since I know a bunch of you here actually work with this infra daily and probably have opinions on these matters.

Sources if anyone wants to go check themselves.

Krebs on Security, the original Popa botnet reporting: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/06/popa-botnet-linked-to-publicly-traded-israeli-firm/

Google's threat intel writeup on the disruption: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/google-continued-disruption-residential-proxy-networks

Alarum's official response: https://alarum.io/alarum-technologies-responds-to-inquiry-into-residential-proxy-networks/

And divinetworks.com itself, which is also showing the seizure page now: https://divinetworks.com/

P.S Some time later I found that they mixed up the domains because .com is down, but not .io which is the main page of netnut.

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Hey everyone we wanted to share a practical breakdown of how proxies can fit into online trading workflows

No hype here. A proxy will not magically make a trading strategy profitable. But in the right setup, it can help with three things: keeping connections more stable, reducing latency in some cases, and separating different working sessions more cleanly.

The important part: don’t treat proxies as a way to bypass exchange rules, broker policies, or KYC requirements. That usually ends badly. Proxies make much more sense when used for allowed workflows: price monitoring, API testing, public data collection, browser separation, automation testing, and stable access from a predictable environment.

For trading-related setups, a few things matter more than anything else.

Latency comes first. If you work with Forex, CFDs, arbitrage, or trading bots, an extra 100–200 ms can be annoying at best and costly at worst. Sometimes it means slippage. Sometimes it means a missed window. That’s why location matters. A proxy close to major exchange or broker infrastructure — London, New York, Tokyo, and similar hubs can make a real difference.

IP quality is the next big one. Cheap or overused proxies often come with a messy history: abuse reports, spam activity, datacenter ASN labels, bad fraud scores, or strange traffic patterns. Even if you are doing nothing wrong, a bad IP can make your session painful. Before using a proxy for anything important, it’s worth checking the fraud score, ASN type, abuse history, and general reputation.

Then there’s consistency. If the same account jumps from one country to another, then from a datacenter IP, then from a mobile network, platforms may see that as suspicious. For normal account management, a predictable setup is usually better: same region, same general IP type, fewer sudden changes.

Here’s how the main proxy types usually fit.

Rotating residential proxies are useful when you need scale: price monitoring, public data collection, testing, or running multiple parallel sessions. They give you access to a large pool of real ISP IPs, and you can usually choose sticky sessions, timed rotation, or random rotation. Great for automation. Not ideal when you need one stable long-term account session.

Static residential or ISP proxies are better for steady, ongoing use. You get one stable residential IP, which makes the session feel more consistent. For regular account access or long-running dashboards, this is often a cleaner choice than rotating IPs.

Mobile proxies run through real carrier networks like LTE or 5G. They often have higher trust because they look like normal mobile traffic. They can be useful for mobile app testing, authentication flows, and workflows where a mobile network environment matters. Still, they should not be used to dodge platform checks or misrepresent identity.

Datacenter proxies are fast and affordable, but they usually have lower trust. Many platforms can easily recognize them as server-hosted IPs. I would not use them for important logins or account management. They are better for API tests, public price tracking, open-data scraping, and tasks where speed matters more than IP trust.

At CyberYozh App we try to cover the whole proxy workflow in one place: residential proxies, mobile proxies, datacenter proxies, IP quality checks, virtual numbers, and API access for automation. The goal is to help users build cleaner, more predictable proxy setups without jumping between five different tools.

For example, you can use the API to rotate IPs, check proxy quality, manage sessions, and plug everything into tools like Selenium, Playwright, Puppeteer, Scrapy, or custom scripts.

Curious how other people here handle proxy setups for trading tools, API testing, or price monitoring. Do you usually prefer static residential, rotating residential, or datacenter for this kind of work?

Hello there,

I am looking for Cox ISP proxies with low latency to us-east-1 and good IPQS scores. Is this something that you provide? I have a very specific use case and would love to see if we can figure out a custom solution. I do not mind paying more. Dm if your interested!

I’ve been using 9proxy for few days now and today it stopped working idk what’s wrong I will like to know if it’s just me or anyone else is having the same issues thank you

Does anyone know a site similar to 9Proxy that provides residential or ISP IPs with port 25 open? I'm looking for a reliable alternative.

What platforms do you use that offer relative proxies prices, like unlimited and not browsers like more logins
Mostly for these freelancing platforms

Started because I was overthinking this far too long and ended up reading about how free streaming apps on Samsung and LG TVs are literally enrolling your home IP into a residential proxy network while you watch Netflix or Prime on the other input. Like you click "agree" on some vague popup about "device resources" and your TV starts routing web traffic for whoever's paying for residential IPs that month. Up to 200GB or more, who knows?? All that while you're asleep. On your $2000 TV. Yall are fucking nuts if you think this is normal. And apparently that's just a thing that's happening and we should be all cool with it?? Boy whattahelly

Anyways, I went looking for who actually buys this traffic and why residential IPs are worth so much. And that's where it gets kinda funny. Turns out a huge chunk of the demand is scrapers trying to get past bot detection. Which, sure, makes sense, residential IP looks like a real human etc. Except I kept reading and finding that whole premise is like three years out of date. Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, the holy trinity. They're not primarily checking your IP anymore. They're fingerprinting the TLS handshake, the HTTP/2 frame ordering, your WebGL renderer string, how your canvas noise changes across sessions, whether your "mobile" session has gyroscope data. Your IP can be spotless and your Python requests library is still announcing itself on the first packet. Someone here on this sub literally tested this, datacenter IPs with proper TLS impersonation outperformed residential IPs with bare requests headers like 91% vs 60% on Cloudflare-protected site?? whaat?

So your TV is being used as a proxy node. The proxies are being sold to scrapers. The scrapers are getting detected anyway because the fingerprint gives them away. The TV thing was pointless to begin with basically. Am I looking to deep into this? Coz I feel like this shouldn't be normal, I mean the whole ordeal, not me looking into it. And then separately, completely disconnected from all this ordeal, some guy on Reddit figured out Spotify serves authenticated AAC files via CDN links that stay valid for 2 hours. Bro is going to get a DMCA notice fast if not already got it. What I'm trying to say is that Spotify already went through this exact thing. The tools are already built and already taken down. What else are we gonna have to deal with? And I'm talking about a small percentage of people that actually care, while the majority just clicks through all these popups without questioning a single thing.

Anyway I blocked proxyjs.brdtnet.com on my router, learned what JA3 fingerprinting is, and now I'm questioning every "agree" popup I've ever clicked. Normal tuesday, folks

Can you please help me decide which provider I should choose and actually give me your experience or advice?

Hi everyone,

I need a good residential proxy (Indian IPs) for IRCTC Tatkal ticket booking. Datacenter proxies are getting blocked instantly, so looking for high-quality residential/mobile proxies that actually work during Tatkal rush.

Requirements:
- Fast Indian residential proxies
- Low latency
- Should support multiple sessions if possible
- Reliable during 10 AM / 11 AM rush

Has anyone successfully used any provider for Tatkal? Please suggest trusted sources (avoiding obvious scams).

Budget: Reasonable (not looking for cheapest, but something that works).

Also open to any legit tips/tricks for faster Tatkal booking without breaking rules.

Thanks in advance!

If you manage several Discord accounts for community work, outreach, or growth, don’t build everything on bought accounts and random proxies. It might look like a shortcut, but in practice it usually creates more problems than it solves.

Aged Discord accounts are risky because you never really know what happened to them before. Maybe they were used for spam. Maybe they already have a bad login history. Maybe the phone, email, or recovery data belongs to someone else. And if something goes wrong, you probably won’t be able to recover the account.

That’s why it makes more sense to create and manage your own accounts from the start. You control the setup, the verification, the IP environment, and the account history.

For a stable multi-account setup, consistency matters a lot. Use clean IPs, keep the account location, phone number, and payment details aligned, and don’t jump between countries or devices for no reason. Sudden changes can easily create trust issues.

CyberYozh helps with this kind of infrastructure: residential and mobile proxies, virtual numbers, virtual cards, quality checks for IPs and numbers, and API support for teams that need automation.

For Discord, mobile proxies usually make more sense for sensitive steps like account creation or payments. Residential proxies are better for regular community management because they are cheaper, faster, and easier to scale.

The main rule is simple: keep every account’s environment consistent. Same country, clean IP, verified number, matching payment setup if you need Nitro, and no chaotic switching.

Also, don’t rush new accounts. Let them warm up naturally. Join servers, read channels, participate a bit, and avoid heavy activity right away. After a couple of weeks of normal usage, scaling becomes much safer.

Buying Discord accounts is a gamble. Building your own accounts with clean infrastructure gives you more control and fewer surprises.

Last month I decided to try a new provider’s pools and got hit with a 40% failure rate. I ran a quick check and found out nearly a third of their residential IPs were just cheap cloud hosting subnets. I think a lot of residential providers sneak a bunch of cheap datacenter blocks into their premium pools to inflate their numbers.

Thought I’d share this cautionary tale. Before you do anything, just run a quick pre-flight audit. It’ll take you ten minutes just to thread out a script to pull a thousand random IPs from the gateway, hit an echo API, and run the list through ipinfo. If the ASN or network type says hosting or datacenter, then its a fake residential IP, and you can drop it from your request loop. It’s really worth doing every time. Wish I knew that before I crashed and burned.

A lot of proxy providers lead with the biggest number they have.

10,000 IPs.
100,000 IPs.
50M+ IPs.

That sounds impressive, but by itself it does not say much.

The better question is: where do those IPs actually come from?

Because 100 proxies from the same small network range are not the same as 100 proxies from 100 different network origins. On paper, both setups give you 100 IPs. In practice, one of them gives you diversity, and the other gives you a crowded neighborhood.

That “neighborhood” is the subnet.

A subnet is basically a block of related IP addresses. Different house numbers, same street. If too much traffic comes from that same street at the same time, many detection systems can treat it as one coordinated source, even when every request uses a different IP.

This is why simply adding more proxies does not always fix reliability issues.

If the extra IPs come from the same few subnet ranges, you are not really adding much. You are just making the same pattern bigger.

A healthier proxy setup usually has a few things going for it: IPs spread across unrelated subnets, different ISP origins, clean reputation, consistent geo targeting, and session logic that matches the workflow. Sometimes you need sticky sessions. Sometimes you need rotation. But rotation only helps when it actually moves you to a different network origin, not just to the next IP in the same block.

This is one of the layers we care about a lot at CyberYozh.

Raw IP volume is useful, but it is not enough. The real value is in how the pool is built: how broad the ISP distribution is, how much subnet diversity exists behind the dashboard number, and how predictable the sessions are once traffic starts moving.

Our residential infrastructure focuses on wide network distribution across regions and ISP sources. For workflows that need carrier-grade traffic, we also support LTE/5G mobile proxies. The goal is simple: reduce clustering, keep sessions stable, and give teams more control over the network layer.

When evaluating any proxy provider, I’d look past the headline IP count and ask a few practical questions:

Do they talk about subnet diversity, or only total pool size?
Can they keep a sticky session when the workflow needs continuity?
Can they target by country, city, or operator when location matters?
Do they offer IP reputation or fraud score checks before use?
Does rotation actually move across different network origins?

If the answers are vague, that usually tells you enough.

Speed and price matter, of course. Nobody wants slow or overpriced proxies. But for serious workflows, network architecture matters just as much.

Raw IP count gets attention.
Subnet diversity is what often decides reliability.