Supreme, and the Botmakers Who Rule the Obsessive World of Streetwear

The coronavirus pandemic that has kept millions of shoppers at home has also emboldened such resellers, whose high-tech arbitrage — legal in most countries — is bringing grief for everyday shoppers. Rest assured, however, that the scalpers and fraudsters are not the only ones hard at work on the next new thing. Dave Kennedy, a father of two teenage boys said he has been shopping for a PlayStation 5 but has not had any luck finding it at the retail cost of $500.

• Since the 2020 holiday season, the bots have been pulling the same stunt with in-demand gaming consoles, specifically the new PS5 and Xbox Series X. As this specific tactic surfaced around Christmas, these programs earned the moniker Grinch Bots.
• IBM’s Watson Assistant, an AI-driven customer service agent designed to sound and behave like a human, had already been widely adopted in the financial and telecommunications industries Laughlin said.
• Now its brand has been tarnished because its product is being sold for a ridiculously high price.

It says its clients have generated a profit of about 400 British pounds ($534.40) on average per game console when reselling them. Target Corp and GameStop Corp also said they have high-tech bot protection software on their websites, declining to offer more details. Although U.S. law prohibits ticketing scalpers under the federal Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act of 2016, no such protections exist for retailers. “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. Signifyd provides ecommerce security and fraud prevention services. Since the PS5 was introduced last year, bot traffic surged 800%, making it harder for parents like Kennedy to deliver this Christmas.

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The stolen social identities of Twitter users like Mr. Dodd are critical to Devumi’s brand. The high-quality bots are usually delivered to customers first, followed by millions of cheaper, low-quality bots, like sawdust mixed in with grated Parmesan. Other buyers said they had faced pressure from employers to generate social media followers. Marcus Holmlund, a young freelance writer, was at first thrilled when Wilhelmina, the international modeling agency, hired him to manage its social media efforts. But when Wilhelmina’s Twitter following didn’t grow fast enough, Mr. Holmlund said, a supervisor told him to buy followers or find another job.

He’s good at anticipating what spots will be most in demand, and his profile on the site ranks him as having a “99% Positive Sales History” over his last two hundred transactions. It also notes that he made almost two thousand reservations that never sold—a restaurateur’s nightmare. Most bot use is legal and can make life easier for companies and consumers. Chat bots, for example, help with customer service requests when a live agent isn’t available; other bots scan websites for copyright violations. Ticketmaster, the platform responsible for selling most of the Swift tour tickets, blamed the massive bot attack for crashing its website when the Eras Tour ticket presale launched on Nov. 15, 2022. The site received 3.5 billion requests that day, which caused the company to temporarily suspend sales and made it harder for fans to acquire face-value tickets.

Debate in entertainment industry

Then why is almost every consumer protection organization against it? Name another product that you purchase, that is nonrefundable, and the price you can sell it for, to whom, when ChatGPT and how is entirely controlled by one company? The bill has the support of Live Nation — Ticketmaster’s owner — and AEG, as well as several major local venues, Strasburg said.

Taylor Swift’s intervention and the collective voice of her devoted fans resulted in a judiciary hearing that put the threats bots pose to consumers on the global stage. Some programmers have created social media accounts that are wholly operated by bots. X (formerly known as Twitter) even has a feature to help manage them using “automated accounts.” Users can create bots that notify people of earthquakes, correct grammar or write short stories. These automated social media accounts are becoming even more human-like. While consumers work out the best ways to utilize chatbots for online shopping, social media users face a different set of AI-related concerns.

Right now, the competition for the regular person is clicking faster than a bot, which you’re never going to win. It’s like if Ferrari set the price of a Ferrari at $5,000 and you were like, sweet, I can get a Ferrari. But then of course you can’t, everyone buys them up and there’s only a secondary market where they cost $180,000. On Monday, a moderator of the community shared a link to the Make-a-Wish foundation to the Discord, asking for donations by users of the app. Others had been trying since it was first released back in November 2020. New consoles are always in high demand but, thanks to a global pandemic, a chip shortage and highly coordinated efforts to grab consoles in bulk, the PS5 was practically unobtainable.

The teenager behind EasyCop sells a Supreme variety of his app for $595. That’s nearly $300,000—and it’s only one of five bots the kid sells. 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. It easily outpaces online shoppers who are trying to click through Supreme’s byzantine website, type in their billing information one keystroke at a time, and place orders before everything sells out—which it almost always does. Many Sleep Token fans have expressed their support for this method online, but there are also many who are upset over it, mainly because they purchased tickets from scalpers themselves.

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Foot Locker recently released a similar “Launch Reservation” app. These apps make the hacking process more difficult, but not impossible. Charitable sneakerheads share pro-bono exploits―or “jigs”―for these apps as well. Headquartered bots for buying online in Lebanon, AIY Solutions has roughly 40 employees, most of them developers. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The developers work to update software to stay compatible with retailers’ ever-evolving websites, which change often to combat bots.

In another case, a malicious bot bought 520 Beyoncé concert tickets in just three minutes. Kinder client Jennifer Wilkins of Oakland, California, said it’s not about getting a payout — it’s about changing a system she believes encourages ticket resales. Wilkins pointed out that’s partly because Ticketmaster operates its own platform on the secondary market, which is called “Ticketmaster Verified.” The Michigan bills would further enforce the federal law and allow the state’s Attorney General office to take legal action against individuals or groups using bots to snatch concert tickets. The Michigan plan is similar to a law that Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signed this month prohibiting people from using bots to purchase excessive tickets or bypass presale codes.

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But each site sells followers, likes and shares in bulk, for a variety of social media platforms and in different languages. The same account may even be available from more than one seller. Scattered around the web is an array of obscure websites where anonymous bot makers around the world connect with retailers like Devumi. While individual customers can buy from some of these bare-boned sites — Peakerr, CheapPanel and YTbot, among others — they are less user-friendly. Some, for example, do not accept credit cards, only cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. While some said they believed Devumi was supplying real potential fans or customers, others acknowledged that they knew or suspected they were getting fake accounts.

Geisler said Walmart is also taking steps to audit orders so it can cancel any confirmed to have been secured by bots. And there was some more good news for those still on the hunt for either of the consoles, with more expected to hit online shelves. “The disc version is going for 300% MSRP [manufacturer’s suggested retail price] and the digital for 200% MSRP!” Driscoll wrote in his analysis this month. “Over 32,000 PS5s have been sold on eBay, resulting in scalpers netting $19 million in profits.” Data engineer Michael Driscoll said in an analysis report published on December 2 that resellers have made millions of dollars on eBay alone.

Attempts at placing fraudulent orders increased 19% in the first half of 2024 compared to the previous year, according to Signifyd data. Even among tested domains using some form of specialized bot protection, bots were still able to completely penetrate ChatGPT App 45% of sites. Fake Chrome bots remain the most difficult type of simple bot to detect, according to DataDome. According to former employees interviewed by The Times, turnover was high at Devumi, and Mr. Calas kept his operation tightly compartmentalized.

About 10 years ago, the owners thought it was becoming unsafe to have shoppers camp out overnight in front of the store, so major releases moved online. It was “before the bots arms races,” said Mr. Gordon, so Bodega allowed people to buy sneakers online on a first-come, first-served basis. When the pandemic hit, sneaker resale reached a frenzy on sites like StockX and GOAT. Rare shoes benefited from a lockdown-fueled investment mania that pushed up the prices of cryptocurrencies, sports trading cards and even real estate.

As for detecting the scalping scheme, traditional fraud detection methods will fail. Identity-based signals on the order—derived from attributes like phone, user account name, email address, etc.— will all indicate that it is the cardholder making the purchase. After all, the bots have set up accounts designed to make it look like the cardholder is making the purchase. As ingenious as fraud bot attacks are, the percentage of fraud by bots is relatively low. It takes an impressive degree of sophistication to build systems to attack retailers in an automated way.