Web Scraping Fraud is Real, With Dire Consequences
The online landscape is shifting dramatically, with scraping fraud ascending to the top of the list of bot-inflicted damage on legitimate businesses. Yet, there’s a great deal of confusion for many companies about the practice of web scraping. Is it legitimate? Is it illegal? One thing we know for sure, it’s becoming a big problem for many businesses, as more fraudsters realize the return on investment behind launching automated web scraping attacks, especially given the abundance of inexpensive tools available to make these malicious efforts easier and cheaper to execute.
Scraped data is being taken and used for competitive or other motives without the scraped company benefitting in any way. In fact, the impact on companies targeted by scraping can be devastating to revenue and business operations.
Companies big and small are struggling to understand the extent to which their business is being affected. What’s clear is that scraping fraud hurts revenue, impacts company valuation, and skews important analytics for many companies.
Business leaders with significant online-driven revenue—financial services, retail, travel and hospitality, gaming, real estate, and other industries—need to make sure they understand why and how their business is likely being attacked by automated scrapers and what they can do to protect their data and their bottom line. The following questions and answers can help start this discovery.
Question #1: Who is scraping web content and why?
The short answer is everyone. Chances are good that for many online businesses, more than half of their website traffic is non-human, with content scraping and price scraping bots making up a significant portion of that traffic. Content scraping software (do-it-yourself) and services (software-as-a-service or data-as-a-service) are big business today. Most vendors in this space offer what’s known as “web data extraction.” These companies extract web data for everything from clothing to electronics, job postings to hotel room availability, cars to real estate listings, and many other types of content.
