One BlackHatWorld thread is titled "Lesson For All: Reddit does NOT Ban IPs in 99.9% of Cases". Another reports that "using residential proxies seems to get accounts flagged faster, not slower." A third blames "account contamination from IP overlap". And on r/proxies someone is staring at a flat 403 on a static residential proxy before logging in. They are all partly right. This post is about which part.
Reddit bans accounts for behaviour and linkage, and the IP is one of the links
A Reddit ban is almost always aimed at an account, and the address is one of several threads Reddit uses to tie a fresh account to a dead one.
The behaviour side is easy to see. Someone on r/onlyfansadvice: "we are using USA IP good proxy, huge karma(3k+ on comments and posts each), posting to NSFW subreddits the posts gets deleted either by a mod or deleted cause no verification, 5 deletes and she start getting "This post has been removed by Reddit filters" and 2-3 more of those and we get banned." Nothing in that story is about the address. Removed posts pile up, the filter tightens, the account goes. A clean IP does not reset that counter.
The linkage side is what the "does NOT ban IPs" thread underplays. When one account dies, Reddit keeps what it looked like: fingerprint, cookies, address, subreddits, the text it posted. A new account that matches enough of those is not new. A thread on buying aged accounts lists the triggers as "fast early comments on new accounts, reused proxies across verticals, and account contamination from IP overlap". The address does not get banned. It gets remembered.
Reddit rarely bans an IP. Reddit does use the IP to recognise you.
The logged-out 403 is a network check on the address class, not an account ban
"You've been blocked by network security" is Reddit refusing anonymous traffic from an address it considers proxy-like, and the message itself names the way around it: log in or use a developer token.
The r/proxies thread from July describes it exactly: "reddit works fine on my normal connection, but as soon as i enable the webshare proxy, reddit shows this message:: you've been blocked by network security. to continue, log in to your reddit account or use your developer token. in the browser network tab it shows 403 forbiden. the same proxy works fine on other sites, so it seems kinda specific to reddit. i already tried a few different static residential ips".
First, the check is hardest on logged-out traffic. Reddit has no account to judge, so it judges the address, and harder than it would a session it can attribute to someone. A logged-in session on the same address often works. "Works on other sites" is beside the point. Other sites set a different bar.
Second, "static residential" is a label, not a guarantee. Some products sold under that name are datacenter-hosted addresses with residential-looking registration. Reputation data looks at how an address behaves and where it is announced, not at the invoice. That is what this check catches, and trying "a few different static residential ips" from the same range gives the same answer every time. (What those databases measure is its own post: /en/blog/ip-quality-why-the-same-proxy-works-on-some-sites-and-not-others.)
What passes: a residential or ISP address whose reputation looks like a household. What does not: a datacenter range, whatever it is called.
Shared residential exits get accounts flagged faster because the exit is shared
A rotating residential exit is used by strangers, some of them running the same kind of Reddit accounts you run, and Reddit sees the cluster rather than you.
The BlackHatWorld report in full: "Surprisingly, using residential proxies seems to get accounts flagged faster, not slower. Our theory is that it mimics suspicious residential behavior clusters." Their theory is right, just phrased too mysteriously. A rotating pool exit is a real household address that other customers are also using this hour. If several of them are warming Reddit accounts, Reddit sees several fresh accounts on one address in one afternoon. That is a cluster. You joined it by paying for the pool.
Compare the "Lesson For All" thread: "If I make a comment using my own 4G connection, the accounts get banned. If I do the same thing using residential proxies, they don't". Same setup, opposite result. The home 4G in that story has a dead account behind it. The fresh residential exit does not, yet.
A static address that only one account ever uses cannot cluster with strangers. That is the whole rule, and it fits in a sentence: one account, one static address, for the life of the account, never shared, never rotated.
Mobile CGNAT is the one exception where sharing is normal, because a carrier address is shared by design and Reddit knows it. It costs more: /en/blog/do-you-actually-need-mobile-proxies.
Proxy A carries account A, and nothing else, ever
Someone on r/CreatorsAdvice asked it plainly: "What happens if i buy 3 proxies: Proxy A Proxy B Proxy C and I own 3 Reddit acounts". The answer is short.
Account A logs in through proxy A. Only A. Account B through B, C through C. You never log into B through A, not even once. One login is enough for Reddit to record that A's address has seen B's cookies.
Same for the browser profile. Each account gets its own profile on its own address, and the three never touch. In an antidetect browser, set the proxy on the profile, not in the system settings, so a profile cannot leave through the wrong door.
Nobody in these threads lost an account because the proxy was slow. Two accounts shared something.
A 30-minute sticky session is a compromise, and the change is itself a signal
Sticky residential holds one exit for a set window, then moves, and every move is visible on an account that is supposed to live somewhere.
A pricing thread on BlackHatWorld recommends exactly this: "best option would be rotating proxy with 30+ minutes IP rotation lock (sticky sessions)." A thread on account setup pushes back: "Add a 30-minute sticky proxy, and Reddit may see more signals it doesn't like." Same product. One person is thinking about cost, the other about what the account looks like from Reddit's side.
Sticky is fine for browsing. It is wrong for an account that posts, because a household that moves every 30 minutes is not a household. It is a rotating proxy, and Reddit has seen plenty of those.
Bought accounts arrive on someone else's address
An aged account you buy has a history on the seller's address and in the seller's browser, and the first thing Reddit sees after the sale is that history moving.
The setup thread asks: "Did the seller give you the original cookies or session data?" Without the seller's session, your first login is a fresh session from an unknown device. If your address is in a different country from the one the account grew up in, it looks like a stolen session used from abroad. That is exactly the pattern Reddit is built to catch.
So do the boring thing. Get a static address in the account's country before you touch the account. Log in from there, in a fresh profile, and never move it again. One OFM thread describes spending "over $200 on reddit accounts so far", one of them "with like 3 years of age, 5.9k karma", and still losing posts. Age does not survive a bad first login.
Per-GB residential against flat ISP: do the maths from your own dashboard
A Reddit account that browses and posts a few times a day moves very little data, so the choice between a per-GB residential plan and a flat monthly static address is a multiplication you can do after one day.
The formula: daily GB for one account, read from the dashboard after 24 hours, times 30, times the number of accounts, times your per-GB price. Next to it: number of accounts times the monthly price of one static ISP address.
A placeholder (your own figure goes here): 0.05 GB a day is 1.5 GB a month per account. Multiply by your rate, compare with the flat rate. Per-GB residential is almost always a shared pool, and the section above is what a shared pool charges you in a currency other than money. Price both, then decide.
What no address type can do
An IP cannot make one operator look like many people, and it cannot undo what an account already did.
The r/AI_Agents thread wants to "automate the creation of multiple Gmail and Reddit accounts (around 100 or so)" with "Proxy Integration: To rotate IPs so everything doesn't get flagged instantly". It will get flagged, just not instantly. A hundred signups from one machine and one set of scripts are a hundred nodes in a graph Reddit draws from things other than the address. Someone in the ban wave thread put it flatly: "total new devices and 4g proxy no common niche still my acct got banned." The address was fine. The account graph was not.
Behaviour is the same. A warm-up thread on BlackHatWorld says it in six words: "Proxy alone won't save bad behavior". Removed posts, identical copy across accounts, a promotion pattern that starts on day one. None of that is visible to your proxy, and none of it is fixed by changing it.
What the address does: it stops Reddit from tying account B to dead account A through the one link you fully control. Give each account a static address in its own country, log in once, and leave it there. The ISP and residential options for that are at /en/proxies-for/reddit-multi-account.