I recall working as contractor in 2000s to a company that had one arm trying to compete in a used car market niche and they had a laptops pretending to be consumers in the usual ways crammed in in shelves that were scanning craigslist and other websites to repackage and resell the info to used car dealers. IIRC craigslist blocked naive dedicated scraping at the scale they were doing it so I assume but don't know that they needed to mix up the IPs in way that required that volume of laptops to do it nation/world wide. This sort of thing probably has been going on as long as the web browser have been commonly available.