Acceptable Use Policy
LAST UPDATED — SEPTEMBER 2026
This is a starting template, not legal advice. Have a lawyer review it before launch. This policy is the single most important document you have — it's what lets you cut off an abusive customer and what an upstream provider will ask to see.
Proxies are a neutral tool. What people do through them is not. This policy sets the line, and we enforce it.
Never allowed
- Fraud of any kind — carding, payment fraud, fake chargebacks, identity theft
- Credential stuffing, brute forcing, or any attempt to access accounts you don't own
- DDoS, load testing infrastructure you don't own, or any attack on availability
- Distributing malware, ransomware, phishing pages, or exploit kits
- Child sexual abuse material, in any form, without exception
- Spam — email, SMS, forum, review, or comment
- Harassment, doxxing, stalking, or surveillance of individuals
- Circumventing sanctions or exporting to embargoed jurisdictions
- Anything illegal where you are, where the target is, or where the exit IP sits
Generally fine
- Price monitoring and public market research
- Ad verification and brand protection
- SEO rank tracking and SERP monitoring
- Scraping publicly available data, within the target's rate limits
- Managing accounts you legitimately own
- QA and geo-testing your own sites and apps
Your responsibility
You're accountable for everything done through your credentials. Keep them to yourself — if someone else uses your account, the activity is still attributed to you.
Respect robots.txt and rate limits. Volume that damages a target's infrastructure is an attack regardless of intent.
Enforcement
We monitor for abuse patterns in aggregate — we don't inspect the contents of your traffic. When something trips a threshold, the response scales with severity: a warning and rate limit for minor issues, immediate suspension without refund for anything on the never-allowed list.
Suspension for breaching this policy carries no refund of remaining bandwidth or referral rewards. If you believe a suspension was a mistake, open a support ticket in our Discord — that's the route for every dispute, and the only one that gets a human reading your case.
We cooperate with law enforcement when legally required, and we respond to valid abuse complaints from target sites.
Reporting abuse
If traffic from our network is causing you problems, email support@etherealproxies.com with timestamps and the exit IP. We investigate every report.