One-Third of Black Friday Shoppers Were Bots, Fake Users

Bots and fake users made up 35.7% of all online shoppers this Black Friday, cybersecurity firm Cheq revealed in new data.

Cheq’s insight comes from a survey conducted across 42,000 websites in North America, Europe, and Asia. Forms of fake traffic observed included malicious scrapers and crawlers, sophisticated botnets, fake accounts, click farms, and proxy users, as well as illegitimate users committing e-commerce-related fraud.

E-commerce websites were found to be particularly vulnerable during this year’s kickoff to the holiday shopping season, the data shows. These sites had high exposure to carding attacks, data breaches, chargeback fraud, fake sign-ups, and other disruptive activity, researchers report.

Read the full release for more details.