# Residential proxy

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.

Date: 2026-09-10

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](/glossary/disposable-domain) email address, a [virtual phone number](/glossary/line-type), or the cross-signal check that names two weak signals coinciding.

Reference: https://spaw.co/glossary/residential-proxy