Skip to content

Residential proxy

published · September 10, 2026

A residential proxy routes traffic through a real consumer connection so it looks like ordinary home traffic. Spaw does not detect them and says so.

A residential proxy routes traffic through a real consumer connection — often a phone or a home router enrolled by an app its owner installed — so that the request arrives from an address that genuinely belongs to a household. It is the standard way of defeating exactly the checks the IP product performs.

What Spaw answers

Nothing. is_datacenter, is_vpn and is_relay all answer false, because the address really is a consumer address, and is_anonymous follows them. There is no field for this and there will not be one from open data.

Why the entry exists anyway

Because the honest reading of a clean IP answer depends on knowing it. An address with no flags is not evidence of a real person at home; it is the absence of evidence of anything else. Residential proxy networks are detected commercially by traffic behaviour, and no free, openly-licensed dataset lists their addresses — so Spaw names the dataset behind every field it publishes and publishes nothing here.

Where this matters, the answer is not a better IP feed. It is another signal: a disposable email address, a virtual phone number, or the cross-signal check that names two weak signals coinciding.

Related

markdown version: /glossary/residential-proxy.md

Verify addresses the same way

The Spaw API runs every check described here on each lookup, with an SMTP handshake that never sends mail. 10 free lookups a month, no card required.

Get your API key

More glossary

  • Area-code overlay

    An area-code overlay is a new area code added over the same area as an existing one, instead of splitting it, so neighbours can hold different codes and local calls need ten digits.

  • Calling window

    A calling window is the span of local hours a sender contacts people in. Spaw answers in_call_window from the number's time zones: clock arithmetic, not compliance advice.

  • Fictional number

    A fictional number sits in a range kept out of service for films, TV and other fiction: 555-0100 to 555-0199 in North America, and ranges Ofcom, ARCEP, ACMA and ComReg reserve elsewhere.

  • International (exit) prefix

    An international prefix is what is dialled to leave a country before the calling code: 00 in most of the world, 011 in North America. Spaw reads it and suggests a fix in did_you_mean.

  • International network number

    An international network number sits under a calling code the ITU gives a global service rather than a country, such as +870, +881, +882 or +883, so its country is null.

  • Live carrier check (HLR lookup)

    A live carrier check asks the mobile networks, at the moment of the lookup, whether a number is in service, which network serves it and whether it is roaming. On Spaw it is not enabled.

  • Number pooling (thousands-blocks)

    Number pooling splits a North American central office code into ten blocks of a thousand numbers, each assigned to a carrier separately, so one code can hold several carriers' numbers.

  • Number portability

    Number portability lets a subscriber keep a phone number when changing carrier. The number's block stays listed under the carrier it was issued to, so block data names the original holder.