Why is my IP address classified as a residential proxy?
We flag an IP as a residential proxy only when we have actually seen it take part in a residential proxy network. That is a real observation - it is not a guess, an opinion, or a probability score.
How this can happen
A residential proxy sends other people's traffic through an ordinary home connection, and an address can end up in one of those networks in a few ordinary ways:
- Someone in the household, or a device on the network, installed an app that joins the connection to a residential proxy service, often a bandwidth-sharing or "earn money from your internet" app, a free VPN, software bundled inside a free app or game, or an app on a smart TV or other connected device.
- The address was used by a previous customer of the internet provider before it was assigned to you, which is common because many home connections use dynamic addresses that get reused.
- Your internet provider may put many customers behind one public IPv4 address (CGNAT) or share a single IPv6 address the same way, so one of those other customers running a residential proxy is enough for the shared address to be flagged, including for you.
What you can do
- Check phones, computers, TVs, and other devices for bandwidth-sharing apps or apps you don't recognize, and remove them.
- On a dynamic connection, restarting the router can give you a new IP address, but it will not give you your own public address when the provider shares that address across many customers.
- If that activity stops, the flag fades on its own as those observations get older.
- If this looks like a one-off, or you believe something else is going on, contact support and include the IP address, but if the address keeps showing up in residential proxy networks, we can't remove the flag.
When we do clear a flag, that does not stop the address from being flagged again if we see it in a residential proxy network again.