How to Protect Holiday Shoppers from Bots and Scammers

It’s the most wonderful time of year for gift card scammers.

With Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holidays just around the corner, consumers will spend billions on gift cards for hard-to-shop-for friends, family, and colleagues.

Imperva VP Tiffany Olson Kleemann was interviewed on Good Morning America this week to talk about bad bots that steal gift card balances and how consumers can protect themselves.

“Bad bots are becoming an epidemic,” said Kleemann. “Cybercriminals use them to see if gift card account numbers are legitimate, if they have balances, and if they do, those cybercriminals can go ahead and scrape those funds from those gift cards.”

You can watch the full Good Morning America segment here. 

“Consumers should treat their gift cards like cash. Keep them protected or safe guarded in some capacity,” said Kleeman.

How Bots Affect E-commerce

Bad bots are not only a headache for consumers, they’re also a year-round menace for businesses of all kinds, especially those in the e-commerce sector.

Imperva recently conducted the first industry-specific study of e-commerce bots. The resulting report, “How Bots Affect E-commerce,” analyzes 16.4 billion requests from 231 domains internationally. Key findings include:

• 30.8 percent of traffic to e-commerce sites are bots
• 17.7 percent of traffic to e-commerce sites comes from bad bots
• 23.5 percent of those bad bots are classified as sophisticated

Read the full report here.