The Fake Web: How Marketing Organizations Can Defend Themselves From Bots, Fake Users And Fraud

Still, some experts see optimism in a series of new, evolving systems that limit fees and third-party sellers — not just for concerts, but Broadway shows, sporting events and more. Promoters say a little extra research and patience is all it takes to prevail in most online buying situations. Scoring tickets to concerts at Red Rocks Amphitheatre is harder than ever, music fans have complained. And a statement fired off last week by ticket-seller AXS — which peddles the majority of tickets to Red Rocks shows — did not chip away at that perception. Since the 2020 holiday season, the bots have been pulling the same stunt with in-demand gaming consoles, specifically the new PS5 and Xbox Series X. As this specific tactic surfaced around Christmas, these programs earned the moniker Grinch Bots.

Stock levels were poor and shipments to Australian stores were infrequent. He’d been passionate about programming for a few years and turned his attention to creating a PS5 bot so he could “compete with the scalpers,” ChatGPT App he says. Despite how lucrative CyberAIO is, Lucas looks at the sneaker bot as a part-time job — he’s still a student. He said his parents know about his side hustle and are perfectly fine with what he’s doing.

“Whether you’re talking about the BOTS Act or the Stopping Grinch Bots Act, their efficacy in addressing the bots problem is only as good as the resources devoted to enforcing them.” By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from VICE Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content. “I was very frustrated, because whenever I’d try to buy something that was relatively cool on Instagram, it was always sold out,” she told Motherboard at the recent annual hacking conference Def Con.

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DiMaggio, who charges between five hundred and a thousand dollars per reservation, owns a sanitation business with more than forty garbage trucks. He got into the reservation game when he was a teen-ager, after his cousin got him a reservation at Rao’s, the impregnable mob-flavored restaurant in East Harlem. Last year, he made more than a thousand reservations at the city’s trendiest restaurants; he claims to have cozied up to the owners and managers, who set aside tables for him.

So he decided that new releases would go online only on Thursdays, and only at 11 am. (Jebbia ignored multiple interview requests for this story.) With that he created a culture; the customers knew when to come back, over and over again, and they understood that they would find something new every time. “Tickets for the Teeth of God North American tour have been swiftly depleted, save for a limited remaining allocation in Montreal,” they wrote. “In the meantime, so-called ‘bot/scalper’ purchases are being identified and cancelled, before being redistributed for genuine followers to procure. Please remain aware, should you wish to attend.”

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StubHub and SeatGeek and all those sites, their fees are so high that they’re actually making more profit on the resale than the bot themselves or the broker themselves. They want there to be lots of brokers developing great bots to scoop up mispriced assets to resell. There are a couple different versions of the mistake you might have made. One is you set the price too low, or you set the quantity too low. Then the secondary market—where you resell the mispriced goods—became a lot easier to use, too.

• Scalpers use many of the techniques Jeremy has used but take things one step further by tweaking bot code to automatically check out, buying up consoles in bulk with unmatchable speed.
• Your Resy, OpenTable, and SevenRooms profiles follow you around town, like Uber reviews, or chlamydia.
• And although many of the fashion-focused bots can cost hundreds of dollars to even buy in the first place, Nate made Bird Bot free, meaning anyone can download it and have a go at sourcing consoles.

Best of all, Devumi claims, the company’s products are blessed by the platform for which they are selling followers. “We only use promotion techniques that are Twitter approved so your account is never at risk of getting suspended or penalized,” Devumi’s website promises. At a time when Facebook, Twitter and Google are grappling with an epidemic of political manipulation and fake news, Devumi’s fake followers also serve as phantom foot soldiers in political battles online. Devumi’s customers include both avid supporters and fervent critics of President Trump, and both liberal cable pundits and a reporter at the alt-right bastion Breitbart.

In 2018, the UK government banned touts and others from using bots to harvest batches of concert, sport and theatre tickets, which were then typically resold at inflated prices. These bots work by continually scanning the websites of retailers so they can swoop in right at the beginning of a sale ahead of individual buyers. They then serve the scalper all the relevant information, including the retailer’s website, price, available stock and SKU number.

For months, one unnamed bot identified by Akamai had been gearing up to fool security software designed to make sure only real people were buying sneakers off a major shoe company’s website. These methods were used rampantly when Eras Tour tickets went on sale last November, causing a meltdown for fans who waited for hours in jammed virtual queues. While many Swifties were able to purchase tickets, scalpers using bots were, too. By the end of the fiasco, most of the shows were sold out or had only bad, but pricey, seats left. Scalper bots first gained prominence in the concert ticketing and limited-edition sneaker markets about a decade ago, with resellers cutting to the front of the online queue. Whether it’s a bot buying or a human, the retailer makes the sale.

People can buy limited-time access to them for as little as $10 to $20. Sometimes, resellers take down a retailer’s website temporarily, distracting security programs to let scalper bots slip through the cracks, said Thomas Platt, head of ecommerce at Netacea, a bot security company. With the proper flexibility, a retailer can dictate under what circumstances it should take extra steps to confirm that a human is buying. And depending on the situation, the retailer can prescribe what additional steps are required—a captcha or call to customer service, for instance. That sort of technology can ensure that an army of bots is not about to clean out the one product that everybody wants but nobody will get.

Despite already being far worse off due to inflation, people admitted they are still willing to pay scalpers, on average, 13% more, with medicine (17%) and event tickets (14%) seeing the highest price increases. The report notes this pales in comparison to the markups on high-demand items such as the Playstation 5 (19%) ChatGPT and Yeezy sneakers (168%). By comparison, U.S. inflation was, at its peak in June 2022, only 9.1%. Things have worsened as the sophisticated bots originally developed for purchasing sneakers online are being repurposed to conduct fraud and abuse for broader retail, e-commerce, travel, and hospitality segments.

As a result, these sites tend to be fans’ go-to locations to buy tickets when in-demand tours sell out. Resale bots can go for up to $5,000 apiece on online marketplaces, or through rings coordinated on social media sites. Scalper bots have become increasingly mainstream, easily found by entering phrases like “Nike bot” or “PS5 bot” into online search engines.

Proofpoint’s Mesdaq said that CyberAIO is constantly popping up as a highly recommended bot on social media. For a bot to work, it has to be in limited supply — if everyone had the bot, no one would really have an advantage. That’s why CyberAIO keeps the number of new licenses each month steady at 100. However, the 16-year-old from England bots for buying online faces a daunting, if perhaps unsurprising, challenge. Akamai provided CNET with data on bot traffic versus human traffic on one of the key release dates (though because of client confidentiality, it didn’t offer details). The chart shows bot traffic completely eclipsing the efforts of humans to buy sneakers throughout the day.

Occasionally, like many teenagers, she posts a duck-face selfie. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. While most customers will be thankful of the efforts, console scalpers have seemingly made a fortune by amassing large qualities of the sought-after stock. Unlike prior generations, the rush to buy a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series S/X has largely taken place online due to safety reasons surrounding the ongoing COVID pandemic, as stores did not want consumers to flock to their branches in massive numbers. The department operates a ticketing system for concerts held at government venues.

Although StockX advertises its verification process, “probably 2 to 3 percent of the shoes that StockX gets are fakes that we have to reject,” said Luber. GOAT, a separate company which solely operates on mobile, has a similar verification model. To address bots, both Adidas and Nike have released proprietary mobile apps for releasing new sneakers. The Nike and Adidas sneaker apps both add layers of security, such as additional questions (to suss out bots), or “raffles” that give the winners a unique link for purchasing new releases.

“I’ve been quite impressed by some retailers’ responses to the scalpers,” says Jeremy. Lucas doesn’t see any issues with the bots either, though he’s seen people complain to companies, saying it isn’t fair they can’t buy these shoes without paying for an expensive bot. If anything, he noted, the hype around sneakers selling out only helps the companies. With a downloadable app-based bot like EasyCop Bot, though, customers get advanced settings, like the ability to add a short delay to the checkout process to fool a potential security measure. Ticket resale vendors such as StubHub and Vivid Seats have become increasingly popular over the last decade or so as scalpers and bots grew more prevalent.

It also says the efforts by some events to limit the transferability of tickets is a threat to the business. “Such lawsuits could result in significant costs and require us to change our business practices in ways that negatively affect our tickets business.” “Lawsuits alleging a variety of causes of actions have in the past, and may in the future, be filed against StubHub and eBay by venue owners, competitors, ticket buyers, and unsuccessful ticket buyers,” the company report states. StubHub, which is owned by eBay, tells investors in its annual report that lawsuits and increasing scrutiny of its ticket business could threaten the company.

• For the first drop of the current spring-summer fashion season, the company opened its online store for about a minute and then abruptly shut down the website and banned most of the IP addresses that had been able to get in.
• Fraudsters typically launch these scalping attacks across multiple sites simultaneously to snatch as many of the highly coveted products as possible.
• Stock levels were poor and shipments to Australian stores were infrequent.
• An adviser to Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, bought tens of thousands of followers and retweets for Mr. Moreno’s campaign accounts during last year’s elections.
• Most bots require a proxy, or an intermediate server that disguises itself as a different browser on the internet.

However, the potential for crime runs deeper than merely queue jumping and profiteering. There is scope to use this thriving economy with its vast networks and deep pockets to fuel crime of a far grimier nature. A tiny 2% of Americans said they would never use a bot while 17% said they would, despite the risk of a $16,000 fine from the Federal Trade Commission if caught using bots to buy and sell tickets.

In the meantime, retailers are finding ways to strike back in an attempt to short-circuit the bots. “Grails” are one’s most coveted pair of sneakers, “bots” are software used to automate the online checkout process, and “copping” means a successful purchase. Belugas are a specific colorway of the Yeezy 350 Boost from Adidas, one of the most sought after sneakers today. The slow sellout time didn’t seem to go unnoticed by the resale market. Even though most of Bodega’s previous New Balance releases carry a significant premium to their retail price, the 15th anniversary shoes are selling at close to retail on StockX.

Scalper bots, or sneaker bots, have been chewing up supplies of the Sony PS5 and Xbox consoles amid a shortage of both units, leaving indvidual buyers in a lurch. In a report published Thursday, bot fighter PerimeterX described the damage that automated bots are causing to consumers and retailers alike. These programs have been dubbed sneaker bots because they typically scoop up pairs of hot, in-demand sneakers and then resell them at exorbitant markups. Much faster than any human sneakerhead could ever click on the correct shoe size and enter their credit card number, bots can swoop in and buy everything in the blink of an eye. Then, the people who control the bots will put those sold-out shoes on the resale market at much higher prices. Reports abound of scalping rings in the United States and the United Kingdom scooping up thousands of Sony Sony PlayStation 5 (PS-5) units on the day they were released.

This was due to dynamic pricing, a model that means the prices of tickets can change if there’s high demand. As tickets started to sell out on Saturday, fans urged bands and artists to push back against the use of dynamic pricing. Detecting and mitigating against bot attacks requires visibility of huge volumes of traffic, across websites, mobile apps, and APIs. This becomes difficult for large online brands that are targeted by sophisticated bots using an array of deceptions to bypass legacy bot detection technology. Criminals utilize the resources and tools available to make a quick buck. Whether that’s buying and selling stolen goods for a vast markup, laundering dirty money, or hacking accounts for their valuable personal information.

UK-based CrepChiefNotify, a subscription service that teaches members how to use bots and alerts them to the availability of hot items, claims its customers have purchased about 6,000 new PS5s and Xboxes. Most scalper bots reload web pages every few milliseconds to gain an edge in adding products to their shopping carts. Some try to disguise themselves as hundreds of different customers from different locations. Retailers are trying new tactics as the pandemic has broadened bot-powered reselling to new product categories and expanded the appeal of resale at a time when many people have lost their jobs, consultants and cybersecurity experts said. All that calls for machine learning and a powerful data platform. Ideally, brands and retailers will want to combine a robust fraud solution that can differentiate legitimate from fraudulent transactions across the buying journey with a flexible tool that can understand and monitor complex business policies.

“The bill will extend beyond concerts and encompass theater performances, sporting events, exhibitions and more.” One tactic is to require website visitors to solve more complex CAPTCHA puzzles that require advanced reasoning to prove an action is being performed by a human and not a bot. “We are dealing with bots in the billions every single day and it’s just exponential growth,” Ticketmaster’s Henrich said. Davies said the Eras Tour attack presented what botters considered a perfect opportunity, where low supply met unprecedented demand.

Still, considering the band broke up in 2009 and has just reunited, this is what most people are calling a big deal. Jack M. Germain has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His main areas of focus are enterprise IT, Linux and open-source technologies. He is an esteemed reviewer of Linux distros and other open-source software. In addition, Jack extensively covers business technology and privacy issues, as well as developments in e-commerce and consumer electronics. A related problem is account takeovers (ATO) because consumers use the same login credentials for various accounts.

Meanwhile, the maker of Hayha Bot, also a teen, notably describes the bot making industry as “a gold rush.” While most resellers see bots as a necessary evil in the sneaker world, some sneakerheads are openly working to curb the threat. SoleSavy is an exclusive group that uses bots to beat resellers at their own game, while also preventing members from exploiting the system themselves. The platform, which recently raised $2 million in seed funding, aims to foster a community of sneaker enthusiasts who are not interested in reselling.