200GB is nothing since 2018 when AT&T mass introduced their 1-gig symmetric fiber. Any single common gigabit link can run 200GB in 15 minutes.
On any gig link, over the course of 6 hours you can transmit a little more than 4TB one way.. which is 40x more.
How does a residential proxy work? Do people rent out their internet connections to commercial services?
Computers getting infected with malware, pre-compromised cheap internet devices from Amazon/Wish.com, and game developers monetizing "free" games by running proxies in the background.
There are usually a few layers of resellers so technically the proxy provider can throw their hands up in the air and say they are unaware of any malicious activity.
someone in your household adds a 'free vpn app' to their device and that app sells off portions of your bandwidth to others.
Someone has a cheap android tv box or similar unpatched thing with your wifi password
(one botnet alone has over 1.3 million android boxes working for it as of this week - https://www.securityweek.com/1-3-million-android-tv-boxes-in... )
Someone start cobbling lists of these so I can block them in a different way.
Too bad AWS didn’t get that memo, 200GB would cost $18 there, and somehow the company in the original post is paying $500 for that bandwidth with whoever their proxy host is.