It amazes me sometimes why people are so desperate to find free stuff online and won’t pay a normal price for anything. After all most of us manage to survive in real life without asking for handouts all the time, although my scrounging neighbor is perhaps an exception in my street. I’ve been working online for nearly 15 years now and it’s always happened and seems if anything to be getting worse!
What’s more using free stuff for many things is just a very bad idea and often there’s plenty of hidden costs to pay. So this site is to do with anonymity, privacy and protecting yourself online and so a big part of this is using proxies and VPNs. Yet I’ve lost track of the number of people who’ve emailed after falling for the free proxy online scam which has been around at least a decade (and probably more).
All you have to do is either setup or hack a server online and turn it into a proxy server. Then you open up the proxy to anyone who wants to use it, you can even post a few comments on forums inviting people to use it. Gaming forums are a popular option because there’s usually a ton of young people who haven’t quite learned the life lesson – you don’t get anything for free! On the proxy all you need to do is to install a packet sniffer to log all the traffic and then wait. There’s plenty of software which can make this easier (funnily enough often available for free!) by filtering and logging just personal details like usernames, email accounts, password etc.
Anyway the name of the game is to just steal user credentials, preferably something like emails accounts, online banking or Paypal logins. When you’ve got enough then quietly close down the proxy and clear up your tracks. You can guess the rest right ? Your details will either be used to steal directly from you or sold for someone else to clone or pinch your identity. Either way it’s not great and your free proxy will cost significantly more than even the most expensive commercial offering.
Of course, you could be lucky and just find one of the proxies which are genuinely free and have been accidentally left open for opportunists to use. It won’t be long before it grind to a halt though, overloaded by freeloaders and of course attracting the attention of the above mentioned cyber criminals.
Yet if the risk taken by the individual just trying to maintain a little privacy are a little surprising then those taken by online entrepreneurs are even more staggering. Using free proxies for any sort of commercial enterprise is the sign of someone destined to fail. If you take any successful business online it’s almost always been built and grown in a professional manner using proper tools and resources. Yet for every one person who succeeds like this, you’ll find dozens who will attempt to use cheap or free proxies to cut a few costs.
I’m No Cheapskate but I Need Proxy Trials to Check Something Works!
Now this is more understandable, after all there’s nothing more annoying than having to pay to test something over and over again. Lots of proxy companies actually rely on this model, they know their proxies are hopeless. They know that their IP address ranges are blocked and blacklisted on most major platforms but they can ditch the trial, go in with a super cheap price and keep selling one month subscriptions. Sure nobody renews, but there’s a steady stream of people attracted by the super low prices.
So here’s my suggestion, use some of the low cost or limited trials to try out what works for you. There are plenty available and you’ll never know for sure until you test out the actual proxies. Even the most expensive, gold plated premiere service might not work in certain scenarios. Yet you might find an inexpensive service works amazingly well with Instagram for example.
Most decent proxy companies will allow trials but in order to protect their infrastructure they need to either charge something or get some validation that you want to use their service genuinely. Without one of these, then spammers will simply abuse any option of a trial and then move out, leaving the IP addresses on global blacklists everywhere.
The biggest supplier of residential proxies – Luminati will do just this. They have a scheme where you can get a free trial but only after completing their “Know Your Customer” program which basically just means validating name, address and proposed payment method. This deters the criminals and spammers who obviously are not keen to register their details. It’s a legitimate way to get a residential proxy free trial to test whether they work for you.
The other method is to offer low cost trials instead, these ensure that some payment method is recorded and again deters the criminals from spamming the proxies. Remember it costs a lot to assemble any sort of network based on residential IP addresses, no company is going to risk their assets providing blind trials to all and sundry. Seriously look for one of these options especially for residential IP addresses.
Finally another little company worth checking out – who have a range of proxy networks and lots of 48 hour trials to test them out for a couple of bucks.