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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

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