With the emergence of social media networks, forums, and other platforms for communication, multi-accounting has always been a prevalent issue. It creates tons of problems for both the owners and the average users. Fake accounts share spam, scams, and other malicious material that steals attention and resources, causing stress to all involved parties.
Although many platforms and services have taken extreme measures to minimize the presence of fake accounts, malicious parties find new and innovative ways to create multiple fake identities that do not belong to a real user. For businesses that operate social networks, multi-accounting is a serious issue that skews analytical data, focused on deriving valuable insights into real human behavior.
Seeking ways to combat multi-accounting, modern companies have started using proxy servers to mitigate the negative effects that fake identities bring to online platforms. In this article, we will discuss the most effective strategies for catching abusive cases of multi-accounting with a residential proxy server – one of the most effective web privacy tools on the market. Here we will discuss possible configurations for a residential proxy and their aid in catching fake accounts.
Proxy Server Benefits Explained
Proxy servers, or proxies for short, are middlemen servers that let you change your IP address at will. Well technically, your identity does not get changed but stays hidden for a portion of your connection.
A casual web connection, for example, a connection to the YouTube platform, involves an HTTP request that leaves your device and traverses the Local Area Network (LAN) to reach the internet. Then, the information travels towards the destination via the path determined in your routing table until it reaches YouTube’s web server. The site receives the request and sees your public IP address, which reveals a lot of private information about your connection.
A public IP address is leased to you by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The client has no control over this option, and the servers that receive the packets will examine it to determine your approximate location, user-agent, and other parameters within the HTTP request that expose sensitive data and force you to disclose your region to the sender.
However, with the simple inclusion of an additional station, everything changes. As the information leaves your LAN and enters the web, it travels to a proxy server, where all sensitive data is replaced with a proxy IP. Then, the server sends the information to its intended destination, but it no longer contains parameters that can trace the connection back to your device. Instead, it travels back to the sender, and it hands over the retrieved results.
Why Choose Residential Proxies?
Residential proxies are the best proxy type for use cases where anonymity is the top priority, and a slight loss of internet speed does not affect the intended result in any possible way. Among the available types, offered by top industry providers, their ability to simulate real user traffic is unparalleled to datacenter proxies, which get their IPs from special facilities. Even though their speeds are faster, they lack the connection to a local Internet Service Provider (ISP), which is the most clear giveaway that the proxy connection originates from a real residential user. Mobile proxy servers are the closest type to residential proxies because they get their addresses from cellular networks, which have many real users utilizing the connection from their phone network operator.
Residential proxies get their addresses from real devices on local networks, which get their public IPs from legitimate ISPs. This specific blend of features makes them the optimal choice for sensitive tasks where anonymity is crucial. Mobile proxies have similar benefits, but slow and inconsistent connections make them a lesser option when residential IPs are available.
Explaining the Effects of Multi-Accounting
As we already discussed, the use of fake accounts on social media platforms is most often associated with scams and other malicious activities. The problem of multi-accounting even stretches to video games.
A great example would be an immensely popular online game called League of Legends. With tens of millions of active players, it is a game famous for ultra-competitive players and an extremely toxic community. Despite attracting such a massive player base, Riot Games, the creator and maintainer of the online phenomenon is infamously bad at battling multi-accounting. Toxic players show no remorse to their peers because the community is full of fake accounts, with many players going through more than 10 accounts in their entire playing time. Without swift action to stop their existence, multi-accounting is ruining the competitive experience for all players. Punished players get new accounts with ease and ruin the experience for new players who expect the same level of competition.
Multi-accounting is a plague for any online community: it decimates trust, creates unfair circumstances, and ruins the legitimacy of user interactions. From the business standpoint, the existence of multi-accounting ruins the authenticity of collected user data. Social media networks cannot derive insights from organic user behavior, while competitive games end up with a flawed ranking system.
How to Stop Multi-Accounting with Residential Proxies
While complete eradication of fake accounts is impossible, online platforms integrate reverse proxies into their systems to create different access points to the site. While the page’s URL may remain the same, its IP address is changing, which is used to notice peculiar trends like identical messages from different accounts, but with the same network identity.
Summary
While the problem of multi-accounting is not going away any time soon, residential proxies provide valuable assistance for boosting the site’s security and identifying fake account patterns. If you get yourself a residential proxy plan to boost the safety of your platform with reverse configurations, make sure to utilize residential IPs for other use cases as well.
