Like reverse VPN :) on one side makes client look like he's accessing internet from VPN exit location, and on the other end allowing for money someone to pretend that he's a residential client.
There are however a fair number of commercial proxies that do exactly that, sometimes via consumer malware. I know several startup founders who have used them as a way to scrape lots of data and not get banned. Usually the interface they provide to the customer is just a normal SaaS “pay us money and give us a list of URLs and we will give you the page content”, and the interface they provide to the end user is a game or marginally useful utility, and nobody but the company realizes they’re doing something dodgy.
> Bright Data is the World’s Largest Residential Proxy IP Network providing companies the ability to emulate a real user in any country, city or carrier (ASN) in the world. [...] Bright Data has an SDK (software development kit) that is implemented into applications. Bright SDK provides an attractive alternative to advertisements by providing the app user with the choice to opt-in to Bright Data’s network instead. For every user that opts-in to the Bright Data network, Bright Data pays a monthly fee to the application vendor, who passes that value on to the user by not displaying ads.
I haven't heard of any of the VPN providers doing this, but it wouldn't really surprise me.
And it's not even illegal, not even shady. I see nothing wrong with getting paid to help big companies compete with/destroy each other.
As a bonus you help rid the world of Cloudflare. Cloudflare serves more captchas to ISPs with more proxies. When every ISP is captcha'd, every user will hate Cloudflare.
It's not a get rich quick scheme - there's low demand for proxying at that kind of price.
I'm not going to shill specific companies, so just Google 'get paid to share mobile data' or something.