How to block abuse from residential proxies are an increasingly prevalent thorn in the side of digital marketers. Whether used to commit fraud such as click farming, fake traffic, free trial abuse, ATO or account takeovers or for broader marketing purposes such as multi-accounting and bonus abuse, these proxies help bad actors bypass detection tools, skewing campaign data and reducing sales conversions.

Residential proxies are a favorite of fraudsters because they allow them to hide their true IP address and appear to be genuine users to ad verification technologies like ad networks, CAPTCHA solvers, device behavior analytics, or risk scoring. Because these proxies can be purchased and sold or rented (by injecting malware into devices for example) and are often rotated on a regular basis, fraudsters are able to elude detection.

Detecting Residential Proxy Networks: Tools and Strategies

These types of proxies are also harder to block than their commercial counterparts, such as datacenter proxies. They can often bypass country blocks, ASN blocking, and rate-limiting by rotating a large number of devices to mimic real users and their behavior and request patterns. These proxies are so effective that they are even causing ad fraudsters to abandon traditional click farms in favor of this type of botnet-based traffic.

Detecting these nefarious residential proxies requires solutions that identify and flag them for forensic analysis and combine proxy detection with other methods of identifying fraudulent activity such as risk scoring, identity verification or behavioral analytics. In addition, avoiding overly broad IP blocking actions is critical because, as mentioned earlier, fraudsters simply rotate through a pool of residential proxies on a regular basis and will continue to evade detection with ease.