So all scrapers are viruses? Need to me.
Re:Update on Twitter's Rate Limits
by DistractionRect on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @11:34AM
(#36601865)
Almost all "residential" proxies are run without the knowledge of the user used as the proxy. Either it's slipped in the ToS/install of other legitimate product or straight up malware. A popular method, iirc, was bundling with free VPNs.
Last I looked into the discussion, the consensus was there was no particularly reputable residential proxy service.
Scraping services work by going through thousands of intermediate proxies run on unsuspecting people's compromised computers. Each scraping request will be a unique IP with a normal looking header.
They may be able to look at the number of unique requests per account but given the ridiculous amount of spam/bots that exist clearly creating new accounts isn't an impediment.
The far more likely scenario is that they were throttled by AWS/GCP for not paying bills and are behind on their migration project.