RSocks

RSocks was a Russian-operated proxy service that marketed residential, mobile, datacenter, and exclusive proxies, but the operation was seized by the U.S. Department of Justice in June 2022 after a years-long FBI investigation found it was running a criminal botnet rather than a legitimate proxy network. The rsocks.net domain has been taken down, and the service is no longer available for purchase. Anyone searching for RSocks today should treat the brand as discontinued and avoid mirror sites claiming to revive it.

Before the seizure, RSocks offered what it called residential, mobile, and datacenter proxies with HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 support. Its own marketing claimed access to more than 8 million residential devices and over 1 million mobile IPs worldwide. The FBI investigation, which began in 2017, established that those "residential" IPs were not legitimately sourced — they were home routers, IoT devices, smart garage door openers, Android phones, and Windows machines compromised through brute-force credential attacks, without the owners' knowledge or consent. This is the textbook definition of a botnet, not a peer-to-peer proxy network with informed consent.

RSocks pricing was unusual for the residential proxy market. Instead of charging per gigabyte, it sold IP-based plans with unlimited bandwidth on fixed durations — hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. Public archives show plans like Rotating USA 50 at roughly $5/hour, $30/week, or $100/month, and larger USA residential pools at $30/day, $150/week, and $600/month. The DOJ filings note that during the investigation it bought pools ranging from $30/day for 2,000 proxies up to $200/day for 90,000 proxies. None of these prices are relevant today since the service is offline.

On the product side, RSocks ran a web dashboard, offered SOCKS5 and HTTPS endpoints, allowed pausing of plans to extend expiry, and advertised a 99% uptime figure. Customer support was reportedly responsive in ticket and chat channels, and Trustpilot reviews from the pre-seizure period were a mix of positive operational comments and complaints about pool quality on harder targets like sneaker sites and major social platforms. Web-scraping reviewers from 2020–2022 generally rated RSocks as functional but behind providers like Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Smartproxy (now Decodo) on success rate and pool freshness.

There is no honest "ideal customer" recommendation for RSocks in 2026 because the service does not exist. Anyone who previously relied on RSocks should migrate to a vetted residential or mobile provider — Bright Data, Oxylabs, Decodo, IPRoyal, SOAX, or Webshare are the standard replacements depending on budget. Buyers who specifically valued the IP-based unlimited-bandwidth pricing model should look at IPRoyal's static residential plans or Webshare's per-port residential offering, both of which keep that flat-rate feel without the legal and ethical issues that brought RSocks down.

The limitation to know is the most important one: RSocks was not just shut down for paperwork reasons. The DOJ specifically said the network was used for credential stuffing, account takeover, phishing, and other criminal anonymization. Customers of any "RSocks alternative" site that markets itself as a direct successor should assume the same underlying IP-sourcing model and walk away. For a legitimate proxy purchase in 2026, choose a provider that publishes a clear consent-based peer network policy, an SDK opt-in flow, or owned ASN sourcing — none of which RSocks credibly offered.