Residential proxy fraud is a common threat that can erode consumer trust, deflate marketing results, and tarnish reputations. Yet it remains a challenge for many businesses to prevent because fraudsters use a range of tools and techniques to mask their activities from detection. They deploy a variety of devices, identities, and IP addresses, each with its own pros and cons for evading detection.

How to check if an IP address is a residential proxy of a robust fraud prevention strategy is leveraging proxy detection to identify malicious activities, such as account takeovers, scraping, bots, phishing attacks, credit card fraud, and more. Fraudsters utilize a range of proxies, including data center proxies that typically give them IP addresses from the providers themselves, and residential proxies that give them home IP address ranges.

How to Check if an IP Address is a Residential Proxy

The residential proxy market is booming. Proxies are available for purchase on hacker forums and the dark web, with some networks offering millions of residential IPs for rent. Unlike data center proxies, these residential IPs appear less suspicious to defenders and can be used by scraper bots to hide their true locations.

In addition, fraudsters use residential proxies to obfuscate where their attack traffic is coming from. While data center proxies are easy for defenders to spot, residential IPs look much more like real traffic and can be spoofed to blend in with legitimate users. This gives attackers a much higher success rate in bypassing fraud prevention mechanisms such as CAPTCHA, device behavior analysis, VPN identification, and anomaly detection.