alt Hacker NewsResidential proxies are something that is not supposed to exist.
In the sense that you do not have people that actively sell those services via their home internet connection.
The whole thing just exists because there's this whole predatory ecosystem that uses malware and malicious devices to sell that without the owners even knowing.
That makes it legally questionable, even though I guess technically it is legal enough? Still radioactive, so as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing that.
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Sure, that's why they sanitize the User-Ggent header when using these proxies. Good luck attributing the scraping to anyone at all.
They exist because of GeoIP databases, and spying on "quality of IP address via ASN".
If you try to use a normal VPN, you get rate limited or blocked everywhere. But if you switch to a residential proxy, all those problems go away.
To be fair, if all you're doing is torrenting or similar copyright infringing actions, then a simple VPN is sufficient. But if you want to do web stuff, you gotta use a residential vpn. Not much way around this.
Actually a lot of them do get sold. Rates range from about $0.10/GB (the middleman takes double that if course) for a program running on your computer, to $200/month for a dedicated extra connection installed at your house.