Ever try going to buy a must-have holiday gift, only to find that it is sold out… everywhere??  Some things just seem utterly impossible to buy online or in stores.  It could be because you are competing with online scalpers who deploy digital bots to buy up goods and then sell them at a higher price.  These bots buy entire inventories of popular holiday toys or other items and then resell them on other sites at significantly higher prices. The bots are so efficient that it only takes a matter of seconds for hundreds of items to be snatched up and then posted for resale.  Talk about a Grinch!

How can human shoppers compete?  Federal legislation has been introduced to block these cyber grinches from stealing Christmas!  Modeled after the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, which banned ‘ticket bots’ from bypassing the security measures on ticketing websites, the Stopping Grinch Bots Act would crack down on the technology that enables these pirates from using digital bots to operate.

We’ll see how long it takes to work through Congress, but it looks like a good step in the meantime.  Enjoy this story on the issue.

~ Brian Kasal- The Leadership Matrix

Click here- Politicians want to ban bot-fueled online shopping. Experts agree.

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