I've long thought that the use of residential proxies for things like scraping and operating large-scale bot networks is a necessity, but I've never really dabbled in using them, so I've never confirmed my suspicions about how residential proxies are used at a scale like this. Do you know if insecure IoT devices and malware-infected consumer hardware as common as one might think for this? I can't imagine it would either be profitable or even possible to work with an ISP to acquire residential IPs, which kinda leaves me thinking that the only option for a residential proxy service would be pretty clandestine.
If you just search for "residential proxy" you'll find a lot of them are basically Raspberry Pis or similar shipped to people who are then paid for the amount of traffic that goes through it. Others are agents running on user's computers, I suspect at least some of these proxy providers aren't overly thorough about due diligence on how that agent got installed.
