New research from Imperva shows that 71 percent of UK consumers believe bad bots are ruining Christmas by snapping up all the most wanted presents.
It finds that 40 percent of consumers surveyed say they have been thwarted when trying to buy a gift in the past, only to find that it was completely sold out.
As a result 19 percent have had to buy a more expensive alternative, 13 percent purchased a gift that wasn’t as meaningful, 10 percent had to buy from a secondary marketplace at an inflated price and 10 percent disappointed a loved one by buying an alternative gift.
This is a practice known as ‘scalping’, whereby cybercriminals use bots to buy items from online retailers and sell them for a profit on resale sites, and it’s only set to get worse this Christmas. With AI now supercharging Grinch bots, the most in-demand presents can be targeted more accurately and faster than ever before. Analysis shows that once an item is listed on a resale site, the cost can increase by as much as 105 percent during the holiday period.
“It’s a Christmas tale as old as time. A child has their heart set on a particular toy; it sells out; parents frantically visit every shop to find the last one,” says Tim Ayling, VP EMEA at Imperva. “But with so much shopping done online now, the scale of this problem has ballooned, with automated bots able to scalp the most in-demand presents for a healthy profit. AI is making the situation even worse, making bots faster, more targeted and more effective, leaving an increasing number of disappointed children or parents out of pocket.”
There are a number of steps retailers can take to combat the problem. These include, among other things, finding site vulnerabilities, tracking failed login attempts and traffic spikes that may indicate bot activity, and limiting the use of proxy services.
You can find out more on the Imperva site.
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