Americans compete with automated bots for best deals this holiday season: “It’s not a good thing for society”

Many retail websites often use chatbots as replacements for customer service agents. They are usually designed to answer frequently asked questions or gather customer data. “Consumer-centric industries are highly vulnerable to malicious bot activity and face increased risks of financial loss, data breaches, and reputational damage,” said Antoine Vastel, VP of research, DataDome. A year ago, President Barack Obama signed into law the Better Online Ticket Sales, or BOTS Act, which made it illegal to bypass a ticket seller’s security measures against bots. Experts at the time questioned whether the law was strong enough to stop the widespread practice.

Although the infrastructure for buying sneakers has scaled, the supply has not. So sneakerheads use bots to fight for a better place in line, online. These bots automate the checkout process, saving the user’s shoe preference, size, and credit card payment information. This way, users can speed through the checkout process the instant a sneaker is released. Early on, he found success with using computer software to simulate multiple smartphones to game a raffle run by Adidas to secure four pairs of Yeezy sneakers. Mr. Titus resold the shoes, pocketing a profit of 1,000 pounds per pair, he said.

“Sorry for the inconvenience!” the freshly arrived email started. “There is a problem with your order.” The problem was that 

Target

 had sold me a PS5 that Target didn’t actually have. “We have to try to stop these bots trying to get our bots, which is quite ironic,” Lucas said. The programmers knew what Akamai’s detection program looked for, and spent hundreds of hours recording thousands of “human” interactions on the same website. Think mouse movements, clicks and typing patterns that reflect how you and I use a computer — not the immediate and automatic way a machine would. On one Slack channel for sneakerheads, a user offered to pay $2,750 for a CyberAIO license.

Second in line was a woman named Alex, who had on pink sneakers and socks, and third was Tim Kimura, who wore an eye patch and a black shemagh. Gigi Principe, an aspiring actress who likes to bake, was fifth. She said that she hoped to be first in line at Lucali’s one day. A man named Baron Tremayne Caple, who had on a dirty pink hoodie, had rushed over to Lucali after cleaning someone’s office that morning. Under the proposal, those in violation would have to pay fines of up to $5,000 for each ticket obtained using bots. Several media reports have indicated that some big time Democratic donors to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign against Donald Trump are making a push to oust her.

Coldplay’s Chris Martin falls through trap door onstage during Melbourne concert

If directed, the programs will automatically pick up the item and bypass the usual shopping cart flow by heading to the checkout page. People are willing to pay for bots—which range from $10 browser extensions to $500 standalone software programs—because the resale value is often much higher on secondary markets, such as StockX, the “stock market” for sneakers. There is a growing need to secure and protect a business’s go-to-market operation from bots, fake users, and fraud. I recently spoke with Amy Holtzman, chief marketing officer at CHEQ, the leading company addressing these types of needs. Amy has held marketing leadership positions at the likes of Spring Health, AlphaSense, and Splash among others. She deeply understands the needs of marketing organizations and the need to protect their efforts from the threats of the Fake Web.

• “Consumers can expect a more personalized experience that is more tailored to what they’re looking for,” Bransten said.
• Netacea has identified one console re-selling ring, for instance, that made about $1 million to $1.5 million in the last two weeks of November.
• “We continue to fight hard to tackle any malicious automation on our platform as well as false or spam accounts,” Ms. Binns said.

The Hayha founder tells me that his user base doesn’t just include resellers. They claim to have plenty of casual collectors in the mix who “feel frustrated trying to check out manually on these sites” and simply want an Xbox to call their own. Never mind the fact that the “frustration” he refers to can be blamed solely on the secondhand market that companies like Hayha are making more predatory by the day; nobody wants to see themselves as the villain.

The problem was brought to the attention of politicians in the U.K., who suggested prohibiting the resale of PS5 and Xbox. But for now, such bots are allowed to conduct their sneaky and profitable campaigns with little legal pushback. “We want to give people a secure, fair and stable experience [when buying sneakers online online],” he said. We’re investing more than ever before to ensure that with each product drop, the experience for our consumers is as easy and secure as possible.” Nike did not respond for a request to comment.

Singer Robert Smith said earlier this month the band had reclaimed about 7,000 tickets obtained by apparent bots and re-sellers. The letter also cited a separate incident where 22,000 fans registered to buy Blake Shelton tickets but only a few hundred people walked away with them. Last month a group of Scottish MPs tabled an early day motion calling on the government to bring forward proposed legislation bots for buying online that would make the resale of goods bought using an automated bot an illegal activity. Amid warnings that problems with automated retail bots will continue to grow in 2021, calls are intensifying for the UK government to ban this activity, as it did with event tickets in 2018. Because of their skill and intelligence, some of the bots can cost as much as $700 per license, according to PerimeterX.

Business

The moment a host decides that a table is a no-show, or if there’s a cancellation, a push notification—“New Table Alert”—is sent to everyone on the Notify list for that night. Curious, I added my name to the Notify list at every fully booked restaurant in my neighborhood, over a six-week period. In the twentieth century, the growth of the middle class, suburbanization, and the advent of the newspaper restaurant review made telephone reservations the norm—until the Internet changed everything.

Other situations exist that rely on bot automation to abuse the e-commerce system. If you buy an item intending to keep it, a return is legitimate. It is very easy to cross the line, and if the terms of the service agreement states that scraping user information is not allowed — if you have a bot and scrape it, it is considered illegal, he offered.

In March, Mr. Lemieux gleefully tweeted a video of botters lamenting the difficulties of cracking Shopify’s custom bot protections. The face of Shopify’s bot defenses has been Jean-Michel Lemieux, a plain-spoken Canadian engineer who was, until recently, the company’s chief technology officer. His public antagonization of bot users — who are also known as botters — has made him something of a hero among sneakerheads.

Companies paying for advertising have an incentive to play down the number of bots to conceal how much cash they’re wasting. And cybersecurity companies have an incentive to exaggerate numbers to sell anti-bot products. If bot building sounds sketchy, that’s because the tool’s legal status is, to be generous, hazy. New York and California have laws that make bots designed to capture event tickets illegal, and the federal BOTS Act of 2016 made bot ticket scalping illegal. Beyond that, companies whose sites have been gamed by a bot could conceivably win if they sued the botmaker. But that only matters if a company does sue—and no sneaker or clothing company has.

Are famous people more likely to die at 27, or does dying at 27 make them more famous?

Just perform more shows, produce more cool sneakers, so everybody can have access. The other kind of answer is harder to execute, but is to really put a lot of care into the allocation of the fairly, low priced good, directly to your fans. Airline tickets have names on the ticket; I can’t resell my ticket to you at a markup. If you did that, then you could just sell tickets to your fans at whatever price you think is fair and shut down the resale market. These groups aren’t too dissimilar to Jeremy’s legion of followers listening out for Discord alerts.

Devumi claims to use its own “private network of hand-picked real and active Twitter users and influencers”. But on Twitter, there is a version of Jessica that none of her friends or family would recognize. While the two Jessicas share a name, photograph and whimsical bio — “I have issues” — the other Jessica promoted accounts hawking Canadian real estate investments, cryptocurrency and a radio station in Ghana.

A timeline of Quincy Jones’ career in 15 essential songs

Motherboard has previously covered how these sorts of tools are used in the sneaker market, and how one of the most illustrious ticket resellers changed his ways to then battle against similar sorts of bots. In many cases, bots are built by former sneakerheads and self-taught developers who make a killing from their products. Insider has spoken to three different developers who have created popular sneaker bots in the market, all without formal coding experience. While bots are relatively widespread among the sneaker reselling community, they are not simple to use by any means. Insider spoke to teen reseller Leon Chen who has purchased four bots.

Importantly, the Final Rule enables the FTC to seek civil penalties against knowing violators. Shoppers armed with specialized sneaker bots can deplete a store’s inventory in the time it takes a person to select a size and fill in shipping and payment information. For limited-release shoes, the time advantage afforded by a bot could mean the difference between disappointment and hundreds of dollars in instant profit. Augustine Fou, who has been a digital marketer for 25 years, says that in the past decade there’s been an explosion in fake traffic. Fou believes the industry was corrupted around a decade ago, when a series of opaque middlemen entered the scene.

The not as good news is that the scalpers and fraudsters are undoubtedly plotting their next workaround as you read this. Retailers must detect such anomalies at lightning speed to foil the scalpers. The only way to confidently spot the worrisome patterns is to look across a broad network of merchants. Fraudsters typically launch these scalping attacks across multiple sites simultaneously to snatch as many of the highly coveted products as possible.

Extrapolated across the US eCommerce market, worth an estimated $277bn per quarter, an incalculable number of people are exposed to financial and ethical harm because of scalper bot activity. Desperate consumers are driven to unofficial secondary marketplaces to buy the desired ticket, clothes or consoles for a sum that vastly exceeds RRP, despite 91% of people fearing that their payment details may be stolen when doing so. The advent of readily accessible automated tooling has made it easy for anyone to find and use a bot. Netacea’s research revealed that people are predominantly seeking bots for hire on social media, with nearly 70% finding them on these platforms and 41% being connected to a bot operator by a friend.

Whether it’s savvy scalpers trying to make a buck or bots—or, more likely, scalpers making bots—everything from Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour to the US Open seems to be getting hit with inflated resale prices almost instantly after tickets go on sale. Not all of the inflated ticket prices were the result of bots, however. After waiting hours in the queue, some fans reached the front only to find the price of tickets had more than doubled.

Perhaps someday the supply chain will snap back into order and there’ll be too many consoles to scoop up. Until then, I’ll be refreshing the Best Buy homepage, hoping to finally edge out the machines. “People have realised [with bitcoin] that money is not an absolute. They could create their own things with maths, P2P networks, decentralisation and cryptography. Whether Tor survives or not, you will soon be able to run darknet nodes on your own computer, which can’t be taken down,” says Smoljo. Smojlo says the darkmarkets are here to stay, no matter what law enforcement does, identifying bitcoin as a key shift in thinking that will have repercussions beyond its hacker and darknet constituencies.

Adidas created an app called Confirmed that only lets people reserve sneakers, which they can then buy at a brick-and-mortar store in certain cities. The term sneaker botter originated with the practice of using sophisticated software to help quickly purchase limited-edition inventories of major brands like Nike and Adidas online for resale at a higher price. The term followed expanded bot attacks that progressed into snatching up concert tickets and other high-priority products sold on e-commerce platforms. While Devumi sells millions of followers directly to celebrities and influencers, its customers also include marketing and public relations agencies, which buy followers for their own customers. Phil Pallen, a brand strategist based in Los Angeles, offers customers “growth & ad campaigns” on social media.

About a year after he started posting those early links from the UK site, Supreme changed the URL formats, so the London URLs stopped working in the US. That could have ended Matt and Chris’ endeavors, but a few months later they got a message from a couple of coders overseas who had created a Nike bot. Matt and Chris figured they could benefit from these guys’ experience, so they jumped in. “There’s significant money in this, and the PS5 is a great example,” Platt said. Netacea has identified one console re-selling ring, for instance, that made about $1 million to $1.5 million in the last two weeks of November. But as such bot usage expands across regions and product categories, their coders have remained a step ahead of corporate security officials.

While the hearing didn’t result in the prosecution of any bot actors, it highlighted that there is growing frustration surrounding the use of scalper bots. Today, these programs have evolved to engage in more complex conversations which allows for a wider range of use across industries. Instead of being directed by fabrics and sizes, a customer shopping for a new outfit might be drawn into a “friend-like” conversation to encourage engagement and sales. A conversational agent or “chatbot” is a computer algorithm that relies on natural language processing techniques to approximate human speech — (written, oral, both) — and interact with people. Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa and ChatGPT are well-known examples of conversational AI. According to the recent Signifiyd “State of Fraud and Abuse 2024” study, the increasing involvement of global crime rings and use of generative AI are resulting in an “industrialization” of online fraud.

Bloomberg reported in November that Sony was cutting its production goal from 16 million to 15 million units built by March 2022. Pallant notes that we place much more value on things when they’re harder to get. ChatGPT App “We are, as humans, biologically built to value stuff that there’s not much of,” he says. I certainly felt that pull, when I was doggedly trying to snag a PS5 by training my brain to hear the Discord sound.

Some heard that the Saint was a high schooler in Florida who had a summer job at Chipotle, others that he went to college in Boston. “Sleep Token is canceling tickets bought by scalpers and bots, another thing to add to the ever growing list of ‘reasons why I love Sleep Token’,” someone wrote on X. Another screenshot of a resale site on X indicates that fans who purchase resale tickets for the tour will need to “be accompanied by the original buyer of the tickets.”

These bot users, while at a glance causing little to no harm, are exacerbating the ‘have bots’ and ‘have-not-bots’ culture that will only worsen as bots become more accessible. And let’s not forget that the bot will need to be purchased from someone, typically via social media, which means putting money into the hands of a bad actor. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act outlaws the resale of tickets purchased using bots, with fines of up to US$16,000. That’s a clear line in the sand from lawmakers, stating that those caught buying and selling tickets using bots will be fined. This came to a head in November 2022, when Taylor Swift’s Eras tour caused pandemonium amongst fans as they fought against the scalper bots that were waiting to buy tickets and resell them for more than 4000% of their recommended retail price (RRP).

At least a dozen times, company records show, Mr. Pallen has paid Devumi to deliver those results. Beginning in 2014, for example, he purchased tens of thousands of followers for Lori Greiner, the inventor and “Shark Tank” co-host. Despite rising criticism of social media companies and growing scrutiny by elected officials, the trade in fake followers has remained largely opaque. While Twitter and other platforms prohibit buying followers, Devumi and dozens of other sites openly sell them.

Fraudsters exploit this by using stolen credentials to launch credential-stuffing attacks. What is unexpected is that nearly one-third of those bad bots have been classified as sophisticated types, remarked Nick Rieniets, field CTO at Kasada. Our newsletter delivers the latest cybersecurity headlines, expert insights, and critical updates straight to your inbox every morning. From breaking news and in-depth analysis to emerging threats and industry trends, our curated content ensures you’re always informed and prepared. Addressing the bot problem requires both legislative change and innovative technology capable of intelligently detecting bots amidst vast datasets.

He wrote a basic automation script to submit 50,000 entries into a sneaker raffle. Soon, sneaker buyers started encouraging Mr. Titus to sell his work. In 2018, he started Cybersole, which gained notoriety as one of the few bots to work on Shopify. Dennis Ho, a senior product manager at Shopify focused on bot protections, said that his team working with retailers tries to change tactics every time. In the last few years, Shopify has devised custom, one-off defenses for retailers who want to stamp out bots from spoiling their major releases.

At Walmart, most of the “significantly higher” traffic for the new video game consoles came from bots, the company spokesman said. On Nov. 25, the world’s largest retailer blocked more than 20 million bot attempts within the first 30 minutes of a PS5 sales event that day, among other preventative measures. Spotting a malicious bot engaging in scalping is a more challenging problem.

Supreme intentionally releases every product in limited quantities to ensure sellouts, so people have to work to get it—and once gone, almost no product is ever available from the store again. But, of course, it’s not just T-shirts; it’s keychains, Mophie battery packs, New York City Metro­Cards, ramen noodle bowls, sleeping bags, even 18-inch steel crowbars with “Shit happens” etched on the handle. People were able to register for a unique presale code to purchase tickets ahead of the general sale, but AEG Presents failed to deliver many of the codes on time, and many didn’t receive theirs until after the presale was already over. The company also conducts after-sale audits, cancelling orders placed by bots and making those products available to regular consumers. In 2018, Nike went so far as to offer a pair of red Air Jordan 1 sneakers stamped with the words “NOT FOR RESALE” on the sole. Those now go for close to $1,000 on online resale marketplace StockX.

“While prices do fluctuate significantly around the time of release, the long-term appreciation tends to be steady and consistent,” Mr. Einhorn said. These days, there are highly anticipated drops almost every weekend. It is not unusual to see a handful of big releases — usually coming from Nike’s SNKRS app — in a week. In online discussion forums, every new release is dissected like a company going through an initial public offering. “The pandemic has changed how we interact with stores, and consumers will prefer a physical-digital hybrid model once the world is back to normal,” Kristen Gall, president of of the cashback website Rakuten, told NBC News in an email.

Drops are only happening once every two weeks or so in Australia, and in places like the US a similar pattern has emerged. When they do happen, retailers have to be ready to scout for scalpers and prevent them from vacuuming up all ChatGPT the new stock. PlayStation 5s are currently selling at almost double their retail value in Australia and, as we head toward the holiday period, they’re becoming even harder to find — a trend likely to continue well into next year.

When it came time to buy sneakers, this bot could slip by, insert prerecorded actions from a real human, dart to checkout and clear the shelves. Akamai’s software couldn’t tell the difference because the bot was so sophisticated, said Josh Shaul, vice president of web security at Akamai. “Sneaker bots have a really big community. They’re probably one of the more popular bot communities out there,” said Ali Mesdaq, director of digital risk engineering at cybersecurity company Proofpoint. “There’s storefronts; there’s markets online; there’s so many places.” Cyber AIO represents just one way bots are invading our lives, in this case competing against us online for that latest pair of

Nike

Air Maxes. It’s not just shoes — the same happens with streetwear and even Funko Pop figurines.

Many potential buyers gave up, assuming that the shoes were probably sold out already. “We may have to go manual,” said Trevor Roskovensky, a sneaker buyer, in a YouTube video of him trying to buy the shoe live. Though Bodega had limited each shopper to a maximum of three pairs, the store found that it was about to ship 200 pairs of New Balances to several addresses in the same apartment building in New Jersey. “Consumers can expect a more personalized experience that is more tailored to what they’re looking for,” Bransten said. Many are confused as to what techniques and technologies are effective against bots, where these bots are being used, and who uses them. Half of New Yorkers plan to spend under $500 for their holiday shopping, and 70 percent said they plan to do at least some shopping online, the poll found.