There have been a number of Chrome extensions which monetize by selling your bandwidth to provide this kind of service. Not ethical but probably not a compromise.
This is not alledgedly but very much true. I was in the proxy business for a few years and in talks with the Luminati people to white-label their product for a very specific type of proxy.
It’s such a weird field to be in. It’s not illegal by definition of law, but you’re definitely in shady territory, with most of the customers being of the “get rich quick” persuasion. Or at the very least trying to cut corners. One way or another, they were not playing by the rules ;-)
A significant portion are grey market "ISPs" that purport to sell residential services but actually never do.
They sell these "residential" IPs to Amazon, other ecommerce retailers and shady people for an extreme price.
In the e-commerce world, scraping is necessary to stay in business. Amazon has armies of scrapers constantly monitoring their competitors, and in some cases automatically undercutting price updates.
Same on the consumer side. I like setting up alerts on camelcamelcamel and seeing price history (to make sure I'm not getting screwed) and to buy buy buy when prices hit a certain theshold.
