+ Sketchy Apps

+ Malware

+ Weird Android Variants

Such as ignoring web scraping countermeasures, and DDoS.

Person buys a product, or downloads some software - that unknowing to them, was reaching out to a central server elsewhere to establish a network tunnel. And over that tunnel, the other server routes traffic onto that person's home network. Which can then of course go onto the internet, and it appears like the traffic originated from their home internet connection.

Other people rent access to this network. The goal being, you have surreptitious access to appear as any one of tens of thousands of home network IP addresses on the public internet. Bad guys can use this to rotate through many different IP addresses when their access gets blocked because of malicious (or benign but unwanted) behavior on the internet. Residential IP addresses are more 'valuable' because they don't have the negative connotation that datacentre and commercial IPs can have, and they can be spread geographically or across many ISPs.

A very common way for people being a part of these residential proxy networks is by buying dodgy streaming boxes, and also installing shady apps on TV app marketplaces.

Help me understand. As far as I'm aware, these residential proxies are almost always malware.

> and can be used for extra anonymity

Great, so you can conduct illegal transactions and have some unsuspecting grandma take the blame and have her front door kicked in?

Residential proxies are in many cases at least shady, both on the side of who uses them and for what and on providers that are often not above using dark pattern to hide them in some innocuous app for a smart-whatever that silently runs a proxy on a unaware user's connection. And in many places in the world if illegal stuff in done using your connection you are liable, regardless if you knew about it.