Glossary

Mobile proxy

A proxy exiting through a carrier network, where one address is shared by thousands of real phones — which is what makes it tolerant.

A mobile proxy routes through a mobile carrier's network, where addresses are shared among very large numbers of subscribers behind carrier-grade network address translation. That sharing is the whole value: a platform cannot ban the address without banning everybody currently behind it, so mobile addresses absorb far more scrutiny than a dedicated one would. They are the most expensive of the kinds you can buy, and they are metered.

The sensible use is the handful of accounts that genuinely warrant one rather than a whole pool, because the cost per account is high and the benefit is not linear. Two things to check with a vendor: how long a session holds one address before the carrier rotates it, and whether the pool is targeted more precisely than country level. And a mobile address does not fix a device that contradicts it — an identity claiming a desktop while arriving from a carrier network is its own kind of mismatch, which is the coherence problem described on the fingerprints page. Argus takes mobile endpoints like any other, from any provider, over HTTP or SOCKS5.