When it comes to online shopping, you might be competing with super-speedy, greedy bots

An Arizona lawmaker wants to make it cheaper and easier for music fans to see concerts by stopping bots from scooping up hundreds of tickets that are resold on sites like StubHub. Dozens of Devumi’s customer service and order fulfillment personnel are based in the Philippines, according to company records. Employing overseas contractors may have helped Mr. Calas hold down costs.

But it also appears to have left him vulnerable to a kind of social identity theft himself. Some of Devumi’s high-quality bots, in effect, replace an idle Twitter account — belonging to someone who stopped using the service — with a fake one. Whitney Wolfe, an executive assistant who lives in Florida, opened a Twitter account in 2008, when she was a wedding planner. By the time she stopped using it regularly in 2014, a fake account copying her personal information had been created. In recent months, it has retweeted adult film actresses, several influencers and an escort turned memoirist. The fake Ms. Rychly also retweeted at least five accounts linked to a prolific American pornographer named Dan Leal, who is based in Hungary and tweets as @PornoDan.

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A spokeswoman said that the employee had acted without Ms. Ireland’s authorization and had been suspended after The Times asked about the purchases. “I’m sure he thought he was fulfilling his duties, but it’s not something he should have done,” said the spokeswoman, Rona Menashe. Tweets from a Twitter bot look just like those of a normal user, but a bot’s tweets are generated by a computer program, rather than a person. Below are three examples of common bot types you might encounter on Twitter and an approximation of the code controls them. / Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly.

This includes tactics such as disguising the identity of the purchaser or allowing them to purchase more tickets than a website allows. For Texas Taylor Swift fans, karma is a bill being signed into law Monday that prohibits the use of bots to buy live event tickets online. The new legislation comes after millions of Swifties were unable to live their wildest dreams by attending the pop star’s Eras Tour. The Supreme Saint didn’t begin as a bot; it was a Twitter account and blog.

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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. The fact I’d come within seconds of finally scoring a PS5 was thanks to Jeremy, an 18-year-old student from Melbourne, in his final year of high school. From a modest bedroom, white-walled with a window looking out into his backyard, Jeremy had coded a bot to crawl Australian retail websites and automatically post alerts to

Twitter

and instant messaging platform Discord.

• “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.
• Oasis, the band everyone likes to sing after too many pints at karaoke, is going on tour.
• The bill has the support of Live Nation — Ticketmaster’s owner — and AEG, as well as several major local venues, Strasburg said.
• The “Taylor Swift bill,” formally known as House Bill 2040, says that anyone caught making bots for purchasing tickets, using multiple IP addresses, or disabling security or ticket sale regulations could be charged up to $10,000 per violation.
• There are a couple different versions of the mistake you might have made.

State lawmakers want to crack down on individuals using automated software programs, or bots, to snag concert tickets and drive prices for highly sought-after performers. It reveals 47% of respondents believe bots have stopped them getting in-demand goods and services online. Many of those affected (58%) were trying to buy tickets for a live event, but buyers of fashion items (35%), consumer goods (39%) and travel (20%) also suspected high levels of interference.

The Elon Musk v. Twitter trial is set to resurrect such concerns. Musk, who claims that Twitter has undercounted millions of fake accounts on its platform, was handed extra ammunition when Twitter’s former head of security Peiter Zatko, known as Mudge, turned whistleblower in August. Mudge claimed that executives’ bonuses were tied to increases in daily users, meaning they had no incentive to crack down on bots—an allegation Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, has denied. If Nike really wants to sell just 50 copies of some sneaker, they should sell those sneakers to fans who have done works of charity, or who have won essay contests. Competition on some different dimension, other than price and other than botting, that’s more socially valuable.

• Subscriptions to the Discord servers can cost $15 to $20 a month, she added.
• But, with the Stopping Grinch Bots Act, at least our elected officials have made that wish explicit.
• Shoppers started to encounter error messages as they tried to pay for the shoes.
• The same account may even be available from more than one seller.
• There is a growing need to secure and protect a business’s go-to-market operation from bots, fake users, and fraud.

Following the reports of the incident involving Carnage, Game was quoted as saying it would be checking pre-orders to ensure only one PS5 was sold per customer. That is what happened in the UK in October, when Currys PC World customers who had pre-ordered an Xbox Series X or S received a mysterious email saying it had increased the upfront cost of the console by £2,000. “We don’t guarantee that you’ll get a pair, we’ll just increase your chances and give you an advantage over everyone else,” Alex told me. Even with a bot, there’s no way to ensure a successful purchase. Because of the payment issues, it took 45 minutes for the shoe to sell out completely, which for a major release is an eternity. For the next 30 minutes, only a trickle of orders were being processed.

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And it’s not just the exchanges seemingly dodging the fraud issue. “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. If you want to set a low price, and you want your fans to all have a chance to buy at that price, raise the quantity.

The bill will extend beyond concerts and encompass theater performances, sporting events, exhibitions and more. “What you don’t see is this is happening for every single event and every single level,” Chilton said. “It may be newsworthy when you get ripped off on a Taylor Swift ticket … it doesn’t make the news when you get ripped off on a show at Rebel Lounge.” Stephen Chilton, the owner of The Rebel Lounge, said it boils down to all music lovers being able to enjoy concerts at a reasonable price.

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In other words, stopping unscrupulous bot-armed scalpers from buying up sought-after goods is something that will likely remain on many people’s holiday wish list for years to come. But, with the Stopping Grinch Bots Act, at least our elected officials have made that wish explicit. “As we have testified in the past, anti-bot legislation should be one part of a broader set of reforms that increase transparency ChatGPT and accountability in the ticketing marketplace,” he said. “For the resellers, especially on the scale that I see within China, where they have thousands and thousands of products,” she added. For example, “data center”proxies make it appear as though the user is accessing the website from a large company or corporation while a “residential proxy” is traced back to an alternate home address.

In the battle between businesses and bots, bots have the upper hand thanks to a lack of understanding. To beat bots, better knowledge of the enemy is needed — and that means busting these persistent myths. U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer is calling bots for buying online on retailers to crack down on the “Grinch bots” that are spoiling the holiday season. Yeah, and you’d look at Ferrari and be like, what are you doing? Just set the price of a Ferrari to be an appropriate, market clearing price.

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The bot makers and the scalpers are both cogs in the same machine — a mad scramble for any leverageable commodity, as side hustles become a survival requirement, rather than, you know, a hobby. This sentiment was echoed by Matthew Milic, an 18-year-old in Canada and dedicated flipper who says he’s scooped up huge quantities of PS5s. Milic believes that the idea that anyone can purchase a piece of automation software and immediately rake in massive revenue is a fantasy. This scene has become saturated with questionable upstart companies, and most of them, he says, are overpromising what their software can do. As the debates rage, here are a few suggestions for how to get the cheapest and least-frustrating concert tickets — keeping in mind that demand for some shows is so high that instant sell-outs are assured, regardless of the process or seller. The most notable dustup of late was when Ticketmaster wasn’t able to successfully offer pre-sale tickets for Taylor Swift’s latest tour.

A certain kind of fat cat has always had someone else—a secretary, a concierge, the butler—make reservations. “Because of the internet, because of the secondary platforms like StubHub and Vivid Seats, it’s expanded it to all sorts of places that it wouldn’t have used to be,” Chilton said about ticket resales. “No one would have been scalping tickets … if it wasn’t easy through these platforms to get in between that transaction.” Oster said ticket resells have started preventing fans from getting to concerts because they become priced out. While fans continue to ask “Is it over now?” the consequences of bot use in online ticket buying will be left to the attorney general. Taylor Swift fans across the state know all too well the fight for Eras Tour tickets against bots.

“I’m not a lawyer, but making a harmful practice illegal does seem like a useful step on the way to curtailing it. Enforcement will also be key.” Specifically, the Federal Trade Commission only announced its first BOTS Act-related enforcement action in 2021. That case, which saw the FTC levy millions of dollars in fines against automated ticket resellers, is specifically what the BOTS Act was designed for. That it took years for the FTC to make such a move highlights the fact that the Stopping Grinch Bots Act, like the BOTS Act before it, won’t do anyone any good if the powers it grants are rarely, if ever, used. Whenever she would go online to buy limited edition designer clothes, they would sell out before she had time to buy them.

Bird Bot fits into this space, performing many of the same tasks as a sneaker bot, but for Switches from Walmart and Best Buy. Nate told Motherboard the bot was designed for buying Switches, but it can work for other items from the stores too. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. And although many of the fashion-focused bots can cost hundreds of dollars to even buy in the ChatGPT App first place, Nate made Bird Bot free, meaning anyone can download it and have a go at sourcing consoles. While retailers like Big W contend they’ve been able to prevent automated bots and people purchasing beyond limits, Caruccio details a number of easy ways to bypass the “one per person system” some retailers use to cancel orders.