Introduction: What are Freebie Bots?
Steep discounts drove Cyber Monday online sales to hit a record of $11.3 billion last year. But some of those discounts were created by mistake. And you better believe people were taking advantage of the errors – with some scoring items that were nearly free, or in some cases, 100% off.
These glitches don’t just happen during the holiday season. Human errors occur all year long. And now automated scripts called Freebie Bots exploit these errors on retail websites. This enables tens of thousands of users to automatically purchase mispriced or misdescribed items every couple of seconds or less. Once the items are received, the users then resell these items for a massive profit.
Opportunistic people who use Freebie Bots can receive upwards of $100,000 per month in free (or almost free) goods – costing retailers millions of dollars on a monthly basis, according to our research.
Freebie Bots: Costing Retailers Millions
eCommerce companies and consumers alike are all too familiar with scalper bots, purchasing and reselling tickets, sneakers, and in-demand holiday items for a profit. Freebie Bots are a mix of scraper and scalper bots, leveraging similar communities and technology that have made them especially difficult to detect and easy to access, with their own twist.
