Feds Officially Ban Fake Online Reviews and Testimonials

Collaboration between IT, cybersecurity and operational teams ensures a comprehensive understanding of the threat landscape and effective implementation of security measures. The ticketing industry has made waves in recent years, plagued by reports of fan frustrations and poor consumer protections. Now, one of the industry’s biggest players finds itself in governmental crosshairs, accused of “monopolistic control.”

This was intended to throw a wrench into the store’s usual checkout procedure and make it difficult for anyone to automate the process. And it seemed to be working when the shoes went on sale in June; Bodega and Shopify didn’t see much bot activity. 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. 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.

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“I’ve been quite impressed by some retailers’ responses to the scalpers,” says Jeremy. Automated attacks on application business logic, carried out by sophisticated bad bots, were the leading threat for online retailers, according to Imperva. Since bots can move at a pace no human can match, scalpers online are taking advantage of their skills to make massive profits. In May 2017, the New York attorney general’s office went after six companies that used bots to resell hundreds of thousands of concert tickets after hiking up the prices. Most bot makers release their products online via a Twitter announcement. There are only a limited number of copies available for purchase at retail.

• It also follows in the footsteps of Arizona, which recently enacted a similar measure, signaling a growing national consensus on the need for robust anti-bot legislation.
• Supreme’s in-on-the-joke mentality has created a decades-long frenzy surrounding its weekly releases.
• On May 30, bot defense developer Kasada released its automated threats quarterly report for January through March 2024.
• And now with the release of the game’s sequel, “Astro Bot,” the gaming and entertainment company releases a new gaming controller that celebrates the mascot.
• It’s crucial to assess whether the bot is simply automating tasks or being used for fraud.
• Sometimes it’s deliberately built into sales, other times it’s brought on by a worldwide pandemic.

So far, it’s not illegal for bots to swoop in and purchase products. Lawmakers last year introduced a bill that would have made it illegal for bots to bypass a website’s security measures to purchase items that are then resold. That bill, called the Stopping Grinch Bots Act of 2019, was introduced in the House but hasn’t progressed, according to Congress.gov.

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Under the proposal, those in violation would have to pay fines of up to $5,000 for each ticket obtained using bots. Chilton said he believes this bill will have a larger impact, especially when it comes to fighting ticket scalpers. “(Live shows) are like constant adrenaline through the night,” Oster said. Kate Oster, a ChatGPT App sophomore studying popular music, said that as someone who enjoys seeing live shows, it’s about giving experience back to the fans. 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.

Nate told Motherboard the bot was designed for buying Switches, but it can work for other items from the stores too. 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. It’s a never-ending arms race, and it’s not limited to PS5s and Xboxes. Sneakers have a long history of limited run drops, increasing their scarcity and making them more appealing for those looking to flip them for profit. Once customers had to line up for hours outside a shoe store to have a chance at grabbing limited-edition Jordans.

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When you can program bots in a matter of hours, it becomes much easier to rig the system. 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. “I could make auto-checkout bots, but I just don’t think it’s fair,” Jeremy says. Australian retailers, like Big W, drop consoles online without warning.

These bots, explains Platt, will have multiple accounts loaded with multiple credit cards, so they can pick up large quantities of PS5s. Software programmers can also earn money selling access to bots to consumers who don’t have the expertise to build their own inventory grabbers. The programmers themselves may not have any interest in the products being purchased, such as game consoles or sneakers, but they can still make a buck by sniffing out the items that likely to be most in demand. Like lots of money-making opportunities in online shopping, many of these resellers aren’t just stumbling upon their in-demand product of choice.

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. No,” said Edward Roberts, application security specialist at cyber security firm Imperva. “Given bot scripts are constantly evolving and being re-written, we’ve built, deployed and continuously update our own bot-detection tools that allow us to successfully block the vast majority of bots,” a Walmart spokesman told Reuters. This year, bots have also targeted pandemic-era essential goods, including P&G’s Charmin toilet paper and Reckitt Benckiser’s Lysol. In Britain, bots have even snatched grocery delivery slots reserved for elderly people.

One could speculate the role social media has played in creating this environment, given Millennials are the demographic most inclined to utilize bots. We live in a world of instant gratification, where consumerism is in hyper-drive, and being seen at an event while wearing the right clothes is perceived to be as essential as oxygen. 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.

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But even if Harris wins, it’s not clear what she may decide to do. Oddly enough, Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance has praised Khan for her anti-Big Tech stances, as the New York Times recently pointed out. The new rule will become effective 60 days after it’s published in the Federal Register, according to an FTC press release Wednesday, and any violations will be met with civil rather than criminal penalties. The legislation introduced Wednesday differs because it allows the attorney general to bring a civil action, not a criminal one, with a higher fine of $5,000 per ticket. A 16-year old reseller in Virginia, Alexandria created a digital checkout tool called Bird Bot that’s fueled Nintendo Switch shortages around the world. For the next 30 minutes, only a trickle of orders were being processed.

Over the years, the Supreme logo appeared on limited-edition Everlast boxing gloves, Umbro soccer jerseys, North Face winter jackets. Supreme’s in-on-the-joke mentality has created a decades-long frenzy surrounding its weekly releases. In related news, a gamer built his own Nintendo Switch using replacement parts. The gaming controller is white with blue accents, just like Astro Bot, while its touchpad has two blue circles that resembles the caped small robots eyes. On the back side of the controller, there’s an Astro Bot logo in gray at its rear center.

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You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. By continuously assessing traffic through sophisticated algorithms, ticketing companies can prevent fraudulent activities at various stages, from account creation to transaction completion. Bird Bot, created by Nate, is able to bypass the digital walls of a Walmart or Best Buy to skip lines and checkout with products faster. “Some people were calling me a scalper,” Nate said in his interview with Washington Post. “It’s just basic supply and demand.” Nate apparently learned about bots as a reseller, purchasing sneakers and tweaking around with the tools. He once bought eight pairs of adidas Yeezys for around $200 USD and resold them for between $500 USD and $600 USD each. In-store releases used to be the defacto way to sell new sneakers.

That group was among the first in Australia to employ code automation techniques on e-commerce sites. Eric Budish, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, expressed a similar thought over email. Like the NCL, Budish, who in 2019 gave an FTC keynote on the online tickets market, said he supports efforts like the Stopping Grinch Bots Acts and emphasized the importance of action. On a normal shopping day, humans outnumber bots on login pages by two to one.

That way, when 11 am rolled around in the States, people could click on the link for the item they wanted on the US site, free of charge, and avoid navigating through the inefficient Supreme homepage. It was the sneaker world that also, unsurprisingly, gave rise to shopping bots. In 2012, Nike released a shoe called the Air Jordan Doernbecher 9. It’s a curvy white high-top with a trim that looks like wheat stalks. At precisely 11 am, their bot connects to Supreme’s servers, armed with all 38 customers’ shopping lists and credit card numbers, and efficiently completes the checkout process.

Many people couldn’t even get the site to load, or get to their cart, or get to checkout without something going wrong along the way, or the PS5s being sold out by the time they thought they reached the end. 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.

Many ticketing platforms employ traditional defenses such as CAPTCHAs, rate limiting and basic IP blocking to combat bots. While these measures can provide a first line of defense, they are often insufficient against sophisticated bot attacks. 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. As for the future, Maurice Bachelor commented on what’s next in a January 2024 interview with Eqvis, where he revealed that Bot-It completed a funding round recently.

The legislation at that time prohibited the practice of using “ticketing bot” software, making it subject to a 93-day misdemeanor and/or $1,000 fine. Despite serious jail time for these offenders, bots as a service make it so anyone who is serious about buying more tickets than allowed can bypass those limits. And they’re available online enough that general concertgoers are seeking them out in an effort to fight bots with bots. PC Gamer spoke to numerous scalpers ChatGPT who reported that their business had taken off since the pandemic began, while bot sellers like Carnage Bot have taken to Twitter to brag about picking up more than 2,000 PS5s. The people behind Carnage Bot did not respond to a request for comment. Data provided by Netacea showed that a botnet which used 300 compromised machines made 1 million attempts to buy PS5s over six hours, and that “cook communities” of would-be scalpers can reach up to 20,000 people.

• 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.
• For instance, one Twitter account called @Table_of_Chefs sells memberships to participate in bot purchases of PS5s and other popular products.
• These apps make the hacking process more difficult, but not impossible.
• Lockdowns also kept people inside, where they needed things like

  laptops

  and monitors to work, or took time to order

  refrigerators

  and freezers to stock up on food.

• Bot attackers have solved traditional anti-bot defenses and Captchas.

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. A New York law last year made it a misdemeanor to use bots to buy up tickets to in-demand events, and Congress passed a crackdown on the federal level. But Schumer pointed out that there isn’t any similar law when it comes to sought-after products. Sony might only be able to ship 15 million units, instead of 16 million, but they’re all going to find their way to someone’s living room eventually. Retailers send stock out the door almost as soon as it arrives with little effort to stop cook groups or other resellers from grabbing multiple consoles.

Sophisticated sneaker bots, which can cost thousands of dollars, are key to creating the artificial scarcity that makes a sneaker valuable and, in turn, makes a brand seem cool. In addition, cultures that prioritize collectivism may view ticket scalping as detrimental to the community. Scalpers profiting from ticket sales at the expense of genuine fans might be perceived as selfish and socially irresponsible. Conversely, bots for purchasing online individualistic cultures may emphasize personal gains more, making some individuals more accepting of scalping practices. “When the government labels an event as a ‘major event’ special legislation prevents the resale of tickets at greater than 10% over the promoter’s price. Enforcement with fines of up to US$50,000 and potential jail time is issued to anyone caught scalping tickets outside these rules,” he explained.