Inside the Black Market for Bots That Buy Designer Clothes Before They Sell Out

These bot shoppers are every sneakerhead’s nightmare

Only recently, they said, after revelations that Russia-aligned hackers had deployed networks of Twitter bots to spread divisive content and junk news, has Twitter turned more attention to weeding out fake accounts. Search on Google for how to buy more followers, and Devumi often turns up among the first results. Visitors are greeted by a polished website listing a Manhattan address, displaying testimonials from customers and a money-back guarantee.

But doing so left the process wide open to « scalpers, » resellers who take advantage of automated « bot » scripts that scour the internet for stock, placing numerous orders before any real human has the chance to even click on the picture of the item. Hong Kong officials have further stepped up their fight against scalping by deploying IT experts to help fend off touts who use computer programs to buy up large numbers of concert tickets online, the city’s technology minister revealed on Saturday. In some cases, they can make up one-third of the overall price of a ticket, as fans complained when The Cure’s policy of affordable, fixed-price tickets was instantly undermined by Ticketmaster and re-sellers.

Status Sneakers and the ‘Swoosh Curve’

Some private groups specialize in helping its paying members nab bots when they drop. These bot-nabbing groups use software extensions – basically other bots — to get their hands on the coveted technology that typically costs a few hundred dollars at release. When sneakers are released in limited quantities, it’s often a race to see which sneakerheads can input their credit card information on a website or app the fastest in order to checkout before the product sells out. Bots are specifically designed to make this process instantaneous, offering users a leg-up over other buyers looking to complete transactions manually. Bot attackers can also take over consumer accounts on e-commerce sites and create false accounts to send purchases to their own addresses.

• Some are kids who borrow their parents’ Amex black cards, telephone Amex’s Centurion concierge, and book hard-to-get tables that are set aside for card users.
• As the sneaker resale market continues to thrive, Business Insider is covering all aspects of how to scale a business in the booming industry.
• “We want to give people a secure, fair and stable experience [when buying sneakers online online],” he said.
• « We have more next-gen consoles coming online soon, and we’re continuing to work hard to get them into the hands of as many customers as possible, » Geisler said.
• A while back, Matt and his dad took a trip to Chicago, and Matt tweeted about it from the Saint account.

Any prospective flipper must instead linger on a waiting list for an indefinite amount of time before finally being offered the chance to license the software. In fact, I didn’t encounter a single botting company that allowed me to purchase their automation service off the rack without first signing up for an interminable queue. Just like the sneakers and game consoles they’re designed to buy, these apps are offered only in a limited supply to a lucky few buyers. But cybersecurity firms say retail bots are increasingly being used to snap up mass-market consumer technology products such as the recently launched PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S consoles, as well as Apple AirPods Max headphones. Armies of bots are sometimes picking the online shelves clean before genuine customers have a chance to press “add to basket”.

Much to the frustration of shoppers, bots are snatching up exclusive items like sneakers and concert tickets instantly. But while some are fighting back against bots, others are taking advantage of them to access ultra-hyped items the second they drop. De Lima Salge, an assistant professor in the University of Georgia’s department of management information systems, started researching bots on social media over a decade ago when she stumbled on some “strange activity” online. The creator of the « Hamilton » musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda, likewise implemented new technology to verify the authenticity of ticket purchasers to stave off bots and resellers.

I reached out to about 10 while writing this story and began to run into some strange recursive quirks. All of the websites for these platforms look suspiciously similar, bots for buying online right down to the interface and graphic design. Can you detect a discernible aesthetic difference between, say, Trickle and Viper, two popular bots in the scene?

Social Media

Last week, AXS took the unusual step of “sweeping” tickets for the April 29 Red Rocks concert from dubstep artist Skrillex due to what officials said was fraudulent activity. That meant recovering passes that had already been sold, then re-selling them through the company’s lottery system. With its anti-bot technology, PerimeterX said it has worked with retailers who have been targeted by these sneaker bot attacks, prompting the ChatGPT company to track the latest developments and try to block these malicious activities. But PerimeterX added that it expects to see bots targeting more and more items in the future. A lot of gamers in search of PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles were none too happy with the activities of these bots, according to PerimeterX. The anger is especially intense given that the human scalpers behind them get away without any punishment.

Nike also tapped the design sense of Travis Scott for more than a dozen pairs of shoes since 2017. The original Jordans and subsequent models ushered in a new era. Sneakers were no longer bland shoes with extra padding and rubber soles; they were fashion accessories and expressions of identity. It wasn’t long before sneakers became a collector’s item starting in the early 2000s when Nike released Dunks, originally a basketball shoe, in limited quantities at independent skateboarding shops, such as FTC in San Francisco and Uprise in Chicago. The pandemic has sped up the shift away from storefronts to online shopping by roughly five years, according to IBM’s annual U.S. Department stores are expected to decline by more than 60 percent this year, while e-commerce is projected to grow by nearly 20 percent in 2020, it said.

Jain is familiar with such practices from his time working at eBay validating user identity and handling risk and trust assessments for that commerce platform. The concept of automating online purchases has not gone away, according to Ashish Jain, CPO/CTO at Arkose Labs. Although automating bulk purchases using bots is not illegal [in certain jurisdictions], some attackers use them to obtain consumers’ credentials to carry out fraudulent purchases. Ticket scalping is when tickets are bought by people who plan to resell tickets — often for a higher-than-market price. According to the online fraud protection firm DataDome, between 2015 and 2016, one botter was able to snatch up 30,000 tickets to the Broadway show « Hamilton » and more than a thousand tickets to a U2 concert.

Some critics believe Twitter has a business incentive against weeding out bots too aggressively. Over the past two years, the company has struggled to generate the user growth seen by rivals like Facebook and Snapchat. And outside researchers have disputed the company’s estimates for how many of its active users are actually bots.

In others, their employees, agents, public relations companies, family members or friends did the buying. For just pennies each — sometimes even less — Devumi offers Twitter followers, views on YouTube, plays on SoundCloud, the music-hosting site, and endorsements on LinkedIn, the professional-networking site. Those tickets are then sold on third-party sites, often for much higher prices. The law bans the resale of tickets bought using bots, and people who illegally sell the tickets face a $16,000 fine. Bots are not illegal, nor are they exclusive to the sneaker industry.

Thanks to resale sites like StockX and GOAT, collectible sneakers have become an asset class, where pricing corresponds loosely to how quickly an item sells out. 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. With concert tickets, Broadway shows and sporting events, consumers are protected from prices being dramatically being driven up by bots. ALBANY – Not only are there cyber scalpers when it comes to shows and concerts. Now there are “toy bots” that are scooping up all the hot toys and selling them on secondary websites at higher prices. I think the thing to note about StubHub and the secondary market venues is how much of the pie they manage to grab for themselves.

This summer, the fake Mr. Dodd promoted various pornographic accounts, including Mr. Leal’s Immoral Productions, as well as a link to a gambling website. Devumi has sold at least tens of thousands of similar high-quality bots, a Times analysis found. In some cases, a single real Twitter user was transformed into hundreds of different bots, each a minute variation on the original.

The Coalition for Ticket Fairness, which lobbies on behalf of ticket resellers, opposes new limits on ticket resales. « The FTC has let the bots run wild, » Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said in a 2022 op-ed. « Their inaction opens the door for scalpers to make secondary markets the only option for normal consumers. » The announcement followed months of pressure from the Biden-Harris administration and elected officials across the country. The ban on fake reviews includes AI-generated reviews and real people that have no experience with the product being reviewed. Buying reviews, whether positive or negative, is also banned in any form.

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, bots were buying hand sanitizer and face masks. That’s an opportunity for the bots to become greedy hoarders and corner the market. 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, ChatGPT App 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.

Sneakers is a newer thing just because people weren’t collecting sneakers a hundred years ago. Some resellers on eBay are asking for over $500 for a Switch, with some vendors successfully getting around $750 for the Animal Crossing themed bundle of the branded console and the game within the last week. The typical retail price for those products are $300 and $360 respectively. 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.

Account Information

The responsibility for preventing or restricting cook groups from bulk purchases, at least in Australia, falls squarely on retailers and manufacturers. Some of his members, « as young as 16, 17, » have been able to stop working at fast food restaurants to flip consoles for up to $50,000 Australian ($36,000 US). « The profit on them is insane so we definitely won’t be stopping anytime soon, » Caruccio says.

In Britain, bots have even snatched grocery delivery slots reserved for elderly people. Bot-powered attacks are particularly difficult to detect because of the speed with which criminals can execute them. By the time a retail risk team discovers that something is amiss, the fraudster or scalper is long gone—and so is the product that each had targeted. Bots « basically go onto retail sites and they basically scan the inventory at a rate often of more than once per second and effectively buy it up before the average consumer can, » Pam Murphy, CEO of Imperva, told CBS News’ Mark Strassmann. « It causes a lot of frustration. It adds no value to the economy. You have bot operators taking the margin, and it goes into an underground economy. So no, it’s not a good thing for society. » Eric Budish, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, expressed a similar thought over email.

« Basically, they’d just bought from the venue, potentially with bot accounts, and resold the tickets at a preposterously heightened price. » Along with Davies’ expertise, Arkose uses artificial intelligence and other tools to identify and neutralize automated bots that try to attack websites for clients including Microsoft, OpenAI, Roblox and Expedia. « We were taking thousands of these pairs at every release, » he said. « After that, we resold them. So, you’re basically buying these shoes for $100, $200 and selling them for five, six times the price. » Despite these inflated prices, 57% still bought products on secondary markets even though more than 90% feared being sold fakes or having their data compromised. Fans trying to buy tickets through online ticketing sites found long waits, seemingly hard-to-swallow fees, error messages, bots and, reportedly, error messages claiming that fans themselves were the bots.

Google Addresses Two Android Zero-Days Used in Targeted Attacks

The key difference in determining bot usage lies in whether the activity constitutes fraudulent behavior or legitimate stockpiling, he explained. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. It’s crucial to assess whether the bot is simply automating tasks or being used for fraud. Additionally, an agreement between the entity using the bot and the website owner from which the data is being gathered is a significant factor in this evaluation.

As bots are further incorporated into our everyday lives, from the stores we shop at to the stories we read, experts like Salge are encouraging users to pay attention to who or what you’re talking to. Because a bot cannot have a will of its own, our experience depends on how we use them, train them and adapt to them. More precisely, she’s an AI-generated social media personality whose features have been compared to the uncanny valley phenomenon, the unsettling feeling a human develops when encountering a non-human entity that appears human-like.

The fake Jessica followed or retweeted accounts using Arabic and Indonesian, languages the real Jessica does not speak. While she was a 17-year-old high school senior, her fake counterpart frequently promoted graphic pornography, retweeting accounts called Squirtamania and Porno Dan. « We have more next-gen consoles coming online soon, and we’re continuing to work hard to get them into the hands of as many customers as possible, » Geisler said. There doesn’t appear to be any at the time of writing, and its listed as out of stock. Officials are also mulling introducing “personalised ticketing” in which purchases would require a customer’s real name, and their identity to be verified at the venue.

Several users in the Discord discussed the bot called Phantom, and what different stores, such as Walmart, Best Buy, or Gamestop, other bots could handle. Lucas’ staff of two developers and six customer service representatives are paid to keep ahead of security researchers trying to protect sneaker sales from bots. Cyber AIO updates itself every three days with new workarounds and fixes for paying customers.

She said Swift’s unique relationship with her millions of fans and the anger from the ticket sales caused exactly the kind of situation that would spark change. Texas lawmakers, deciding not to be the anti-hero, looked into the issue this legislative session. Lewisville Rep. Kronda Thimesch introduced a similar bill to Zaffirini’s in an attempt to quell fans’ bad blood, partially because her own daughter was unable to get tickets. When they first drop, most of Supreme’s popular pieces don’t cost much more than a video­game—but obsessives who strike out will spend big bucks on the secondary market to snag the company’s coveted hypebeast staples. « Folks buying from scalpers are just as culpable as the scalpers. If you didn’t buy from them there’d be no market. Disregard the band’s instructions and risk your money. The definition of F around and find out, » someone else wrote. The company said it has doubled its membership to 4,000 since the start of the pandemic, when many of its members lost their jobs.

• Those tickets are then sold on third-party sites, often for much higher prices.
• But if you own any type of electronic device—a phone, computer, tablet or even smartwatch—chances are you’re using AI every day, especially when it comes to bots.
• “It’s too embarrassing for them to admit that they purchased fraudulent inventory.” He cites one rare attempt to sue by Uber, after it discovered Austin-based advertising company Phunware was selling fake app installs using bots.
• Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

One bot, called CyberAIO, has gained notoriety as a surefire way to nab the most coveted collectibles in the $42 billion sneakerhead business. Expect fans to tussle over the chance to buy a pair of Kanye West’s Yeezy Wave Runners, which retail for $300 but have sold for as much as $2,000 in the secondary market. The day-job salary earned by Omoregie, the electrical engineer who built RSVP Sniper, pales next to the revenue from his add-to-cart and Twitter bots.

Davies spent years programming bots to attack e-commerce sites to buy up mass numbers of limited-edition athletic shoes. Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, and other major event ticketing companies announced last year that they would institute an “all-in” pricing model, meaning that consumers will no longer be surprised by additional fees at the checkout. Instead, when consumers buy their tickets through these companies, they’ll know upfront exactly how much they’re going to end up paying. According to a legislative analysis, the use of bots to buy tickets is already illegal on the federal level, but enforcement has been largely ineffective, leaving Michiganders vulnerable to exploitation.