How the malicious Grinch bots’ are stealing Christmas

When my brother-in-law tried to buy a Barbie gymnast as a Christmas present for my daughter last week, the doll kept disappearing from every online store he visited.

- ANTHONY CUTHBERTSON

Each time he went to add it to his shopping cart, the toy would suddenly vanish from the virtual shelves.

“I feel like I’ve been living online the scenes from 1990s and 2000s movies, where parents fight in toy stores,” he tells me. But instead of just tussles between parents, the battle is now also against bots, which are capable of filling online carts and autofilling payment details at superhuman speeds.

The Barbie doll is one of countless toys and other popular items that scalpers appear to have set their software upon this Christmas, aiming to buy them up in order to sell them on at inflated prices.

These malicious tools, known as Grinch bots, monitor online inventories in order to identify sought-after products. They are then able to operate in vast numbers to deplete stock on a webwide scale. They have been around for several years, usually appearing around Black Friday, with internet monitor Cloudflare identifying more than 300 billion shopping bots capable of purchasing goods online.