datacenter-vs-residential-ip-fraud

No. Proxy networks supply addresses in whatever market the buyer wants, so traffic can arrive from a street in your service area and still be automated. A local address is not evidence of a real customer, it is only the absence of an obvious contradiction. Location is context, not identity, and it should never be the whole basis for a judgment.

Usually not. Mobile carriers put large numbers of unrelated subscribers behind shared address space, so a single entry can cover a great many people who have nothing to do with each other. Block one and you may be shutting out everyone in an area who browses on that network. On mobile especially, an address is a poor proxy for a person.

It is infrastructure that routes traffic through real household internet connections, rented by whoever is paying for it. Some householders agree to this knowingly, many through app terms nobody reads. The result is that automated traffic arrives from an ordinary domestic address in a believable location, with no hosting provider anywhere in the attribution to give it away.

Two reasons. Fraud operations rotate through large pools of addresses, so the one you blocked stopped being used shortly after you found it. And residential addresses are reassigned between customers over time, so an old entry may now belong to a genuine prospect you are quietly refusing to serve ads to. A hand-built list has no expiry and no feedback.

Be careful. Plenty of unwanted automation comes from hosting ranges, but so do services you depend on. Googlebot and AdsBot-Google operate from Google infrastructure, and blocking them costs you organic indexing and breaks your ad landing page checks. A blunt rule aimed at all server traffic tends to do more damage than the fraud it was written to stop.

A datacenter IP belongs to a hosting company or cloud provider and exists to run servers. A residential IP is assigned by a consumer internet provider to a home or mobile connection, which is where your actual customers browse from. Datacenter ranges are publicly attributed and stable. Residential addresses get reassigned between customers over time, which is what makes them harder to reason about.