google "residential proxies for sale" - there is a whole huge grey market in selling proxies from peoples' actual residential internet connections, usually to be driven by bots or people in click-farms somewhere in a low labor cost location.

If you want to appear to be a legitimate comcast, charter, centurylink, frontier end user on a last mile broadband connection in a house somewhere in the US48 states, that's a standard service that fraudulent organizations make use of now.

Usually using software that people have been tricked into installing on their computers.

I don't need to Google them. "Residential proxies for sale" is one of the most common Facebook ads I see. There was one on my screen just five minutes ago. It's staggering that the industry is so blatant.

Exactly, and this is why "in theory" Google reCaptcha, the that is just a checkbox, is a needed solution. If they only used it to just stop spam and not also to track legitimate users...

Lots of VPNs route through hosting providers. Some hosting providers are more prevalent with spammers than others. But in the end you can only really use it as a scoring measure. It's not nearly binary enough to straight filter using it.

Agreed but I'd rather lose the small percentage of users on VPNs than have my site flooded with junk traffic and spam