Shoppers beware: Grinch bots are a holiday shopping problem

Fake reviews and testimonials for services and products have been under the watchful eye of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for decades. With the proliferation of online bots and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, reviews and testimonials have been even easier to fake in recent years. On August 14, 2024, the FTC announced the Final Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, prohibiting fake reviews and testimonials from being sold or purchased by businesses.

In an interview, she described the purchases as “an experiment I did several years ago to see how it worked.” She made more than a dozen purchases of followers from 2015 to 2017, according to company records. Ms. Ireland has over a million followers on Twitter, which she often uses to promote companies with whom she has endorsement deals. The Wisconsin-based American Family Insurance, for example, said that the former model was one of its most influential Twitter “brand ambassadors,” celebrities who are paid to help promote products.

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You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Kate Oster, a sophomore studying popular music, said that as someone who enjoys seeing live shows, it’s about giving experience back to the fans. “If we think it’s automated, we challenge it,” said Arkose Labs CEO and founder Kevin Gosschalk. “And that challenge is a way of forcing the bad actors to have to do an action of some kind.” “[When I heard what happened] I thought someone just made a lot of money,” Davies said. The Final Rule is largely in accordance with the FTC’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) and Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPR), which we previously wrote about here and here. It makes it incredibly time-consuming and expensive to attempt to succeed.

Given the outrageous demand and limited supply, sneakerheads are ready and willing to pay for any advantage in grabbing the latest release. At about $300, AIY Solutions bots are among the most expensive consumer sneaker bots. Comparable bots like NikeSlayer and Better Nike Bot start at $150 and $200, respectively. That year, the bot was put to the test when Nike released an Air Max 1/97 in collaboration with Sean Wotherspoon, a famous sneaker collector. Nike had allocated shoes for Kith, a sneaker boutique in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, to sell on its website, which is powered by Shopify.

A tool for beating others to buying the items you want consists of three main components, finalphoenix explained. Users will also need to get some server space to run their bots. Attackers might use bots to get a list of credit cards or stolen financials, he continued. Then, they use that scraped information to buy and ship an item purchased for that purpose.

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Even with a vaccine on the horizon, retailers are preparing for a new normal where store space becomes less valuable and online integration continues to boom, Bransten said. “As e-commerce is becoming a bigger piece of most of the bigger brands’ businesses now, you’re getting that critical mass online and they will say, “How can I invest in these new capabilities? “The acceleration of the customer toward digital capabilities has been unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Shelley Bransten, Microsoft’s vice president of global retail and consumer goods, told NBC News.

• After The Times contacted Ms. Greiner, Mr. Pallen said he had “experimented” with the company but “stopped using it long ago.” A lawyer for Ms. Greiner said she had asked him to stop after learning of the first purchases.
• It’s crucial to assess whether the bot is simply automating tasks or being used for fraud.
• This was due to dynamic pricing, a model that means the prices of tickets can change if there’s high demand.

In June, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), a US industry group, published a blog post that estimated that ad fraud is costing US advertisers $120 billion each year. John Wolfe, the ANA’s director of communications, tells WIRED that the figures were removed because they were out of date, but declines to provide any new figures. That would be a way of redesigning the market to produce value-creating competition, not value-destroying competition.

Businesses have burned through marketing budgets and made poor decisions based on bad marketing data. Despite a lower profile, this ChatGPT is just as big a problem as ad fraud. We wanted to know what businesses knew about bots — and what myths they still believed.

Once the software is purchased, members decide if they want to keep or “flip” the bots to make a profit on the resale market. Here’s how one bot nabbing and reselling group, Restock Flippers, keeps its 600 paying members on top of the bot market. By 1999, a crop of new Web sites—RSVIP.com, Reservemytable.com, Foodline.com, OpenTable.com—were competing to automate the process. Tavern on the Green’s owner, Warner LeRoy, started taking reservations on the restaurant’s Web site.

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In reality, he has used Appointment Trader, just like everyone else. U.S. lawmakers are giving fans a spark of hope they could buy event tickets at more affordable prices. Several senators told CBS News they would support federal legislation that limits the profit sellers can make on the ticket resale market. The idea stems from growing calls for a crackdown on resale practices, which derailed the 2022 Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket rollout. “The tour has put this policy in place to cap ticket resale prices to combat price inflation and prevent ticket touting and bots,” Norton says. Former employees said the company’s security team for many years was more focused on abuse by real users, including racist and sexist content and orchestrated harassment campaigns.

“Fighting scalping and trying to come up with (solutions) has been an issue as long as there’s live events,” Chilton said. Hobbs also signed House Bill 2194, which regulates the actions ChatGPT App of “a reseller, a secondary ticket exchange or any affiliate of a reseller or secondary ticket exchange.” “(Live shows) are like constant adrenaline through the night,” Oster said.

But while drones and autonomous vehicles may catch shopper interest, they may not be the technologies that are here to stay once stores open up again. Instead, curbside pickup, stores with a smaller footprint, and personalized shopping fueled by artificial intelligence may all become a regular fixture when it comes to shopping in the post-pandemic era, industry watchers say. The coronavirus decimated the retail industry in 2020 — but also fueled dramatic advances in new technology. From Walmart’s self-driving delivery trucks to American Eagle’s virtual stores, the retail industry has advanced several years in just nine months, experts say. Bots are being “democratized” and offered as a service, so the assumption that large nation states are behind all bot attacks and are bought and sold on the dark web are completely out of date. As Switches have repeatedly vanished, plenty of people have directed animosity towards resellers who aren’t buying consoles for their own enjoyment but to make a quick buck during the global pandemic.

One account looked like that of Ms. Rychly, the young Minnesota woman. Devumi’s founder, German Calas, denied that his company sold fake followers and said he knew nothing about social identities stolen from real users. “The allegations are false, and we do not have knowledge of any such activity,” Mr. Calas said in an email exchange in November.

• “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.”
• Rare shoes benefited from a lockdown-fueled investment mania that pushed up the prices of cryptocurrencies, sports trading cards and even real estate.
• In reality, he has used Appointment Trader, just like everyone else.
• But for those without coding knowledge, these aren’t viable solutions.
• Instead, curbside pickup, stores with a smaller footprint, and personalized shopping fueled by artificial intelligence may all become a regular fixture when it comes to shopping in the post-pandemic era, industry watchers say.

But the company has waged background warfare for the past few years. It appears to ban IP addresses that seem to be having a little too much success buying its clothes and, instead of using the ubiquitous ecommerce framework Shopify for its backend, built its own harder-to-game web infrastructure. Chris has spent hours examining the Supreme site’s source code, looking for changes that could affect the bot’s success rate. These are often things, he says, like added periods after the letters CVV that prevent the bot from figuring out where to insert the necessary credit card verification code. It takes constant vigilance to keep up with the company’s moves. “When you have this kind of demand for product, there’s going to be someone out there who’s going to find a work-around,” says Brandon Beaty, former communications director for Adidas Originals.

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Fraudsters know that the early stages of the payment process—account creation, account login and updating accounts with additional payment forms—are more vulnerable than the actual checkout. Retailers don’t want to turn away customers before they’ve even had a chance to be customers, so they avoid friction and erect fewer barriers in the early payment stages. So, if bot attacks are so devastating and difficult to detect, what’s a retailer to do? Perhaps, bots for buying online not surprisingly, the best way to fight a bot attack is with an automated protection solution. Rapid-fire fraud targets the entire online payment journey that a legitimate customer would typically make—from account creation to credit card authorization at the beginning of the payment process to final credit card verification at checkout. “Bots harm consumers and undermine retailers’ efforts to sell their product the way they want to,” he said.

Devumi’s products serve politicians and governments overseas, too. An editor at China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, paid Devumi for hundreds of thousands of followers and retweets on Twitter, which the country’s government has banned but sees as a forum for issuing propaganda abroad. 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. The accounts that most resemble real people, like Ms. Rychly, reveal a kind of large-scale social identity theft. At least 55,000 of the accounts use the names, profile pictures, hometowns and other personal details of real Twitter users, including minors, according to a Times data analysis. The report said scalpers have so far made over $9 million in profits from Xbox consoles, some selling for more than 50 percent over the normal retail price.

State Sen. John Kavanagh has proposed a law, Senate Bill 1011, that would make it illegal to use a computer to impersonate a human for “nefarious” reasons. His current LinkedIn page says that he has a master’s degree in “international business” from M.I.T., a degree it does not offer. “I started this company with a thousand dollars in the bank, without investors, and only the burning passion for success,” Mr. Calas wrote last year on the job-listing site Glassdoor. But her Twitter account — and her brother’s — are boosted by thousands of retweets purchased by their mother and manager, Shadia Daho, according to Devumi records. Ms. Daho did not respond to repeated attempts to reach her by email and through a public relations firm.

In the old days, if something was priced at 50 bucks, but worth 200 bucks, there’d be a lot of shady brokers who would get the $50 tickets to then resell at 200 bucks, but a lot of fans would also get $50 tickets and be quite happy about it. But if all the tickets get scooped up by ticket bots at 50 bucks and then resold at 200 bucks, that doesn’t do the team or the artist any good. The internet kind of broke the ability to mostly get your tickets to your fans at a low price. Bird Bot may have been specifically designed for buying Switches, but other more established tools typically used to source sneakers are pivoting to the Nintendo Switch space as well. Nate, the Bird Bot creator, told Motherboard both Scottbot and Swift, two other bots, can work to buy Switches.

Now its brand has been tarnished because its product is being sold for a ridiculously high price. Not only that, but Sony and the retailer lost control of the customer experience and the chance to build a relationship with that PS-5 buyer. Brands and retailers can protect these early stages from fraud with machine learning that can detect behavior typical of a bot. Once seen, the merchant can introduce a step-up challenge—say, a simple captcha. That step will weed out bot-behavior without slowing down the purchase by referring the order to a human fraud review team.