Proxycurl API People Profile endpoint crawls public Professional Social Network Profiles. Not all Professional Social Network profiles, even if valid, have public profiles. In instances as such, our Professional Social Network People Profile Endpoint will return with a 404 status code.
Today, we launched an update to our service to charge credits when an API request is made to scrape a public Professional Social Network Profile that is missing a public profile.
The reason is that the resources needed to scrape a valid profile and an invalid profile are the same and equally expended.
We have had at least one instance of an attacker (via a trial API key) exploiting this and spamming many requests to random invalid profile URLs. This attack clogged up Proxycurl's API service leading to a denial of service.
I seek your understanding of this change as we take action towards building a sustainable service for our users who are building businesses on top of Proxycurl's services.