What you can (and can't) use the proxies for

Short version: collecting public data at a sensible pace is fine. Doing something to a person is not. That's the line we draw, and it's the one we enforce.

Fine by us

• Scraping publicly accessible data at a considerate rate
• Price monitoring, market research and competitor analysis
• Ad verification and brand protection
• SEO and search ranking monitoring
• Checking how your own site or app behaves from another country
• Sneaker, ticket and release bots
• Academic and journalistic research
• Testing your own infrastructure

Not fine, and the account gets closed

This list shows the kind of thing we mean. Something that isn't named but does the same kind of harm is still out.

• Credential stuffing and account takeover: testing stolen logins against any service.
• Child sexual abuse material, in any form.
• Harassment and stalking, including getting round a block someone placed on you.
• Fraud: carding, payment fraud, fake account farms for scams, phishing, referral-programme abuse, trademark bidding in ad auctions, pyramid and multi-level-marketing schemes.
• Attacks on infrastructure: DDoS, scanning third parties' ports, exploiting vulnerabilities you're not authorised to test, spreading malware.
• Spam: bulk unsolicited messages on any platform.
• Deliberately overloading a target: enough volume to slow a service down for its real users.
• Reselling access without a written agreement with us.

Grey areas

Automated account creation, scraping behind a login you legitimately hold, and high-volume crawling of a small site depend on scale, intent and where you are. If you're not sure, ask before you start: email support@proxymonkey.io.

What happens on a breach

We act on abuse reports and on what our own monitoring flags, and we suspend accounts that break the policy. When we close an account for abuse, we refund the whole unused balance, however old the top-up, unless it was paid for fraudulently. We'd rather not make money from abuse.

Whether a particular use is legal where you are, and allowed by the target site's terms, is yours to check. We can't give legal advice about your scraping.

Full policy: acceptable use policy. Seen abuse coming from our network? See Telling us about abuse from our network.