From April 2024 until the most recent drop in August 2024, bot operators purchased a large percentage of Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” album — packaged with a hand-signed photo of the artist — from her Shopify store, leaving many loyal fans disappointed.
Why it matters
Currently, there are no consumer-protection laws in the United States that prevent bot operators from using AI-powered bots to purchase large quantities of scarce, limited-release products. This gives operators an unfair advantage over regular consumers and makes these products especially susceptible to bot interference during distribution.
Driving the news
Starting in April 2024, Taylor Swift’s release of “The Tortured Poets Department” with a hand-signed photo sparked high demand, with vinyl and CD editions selling out almost instantly. Bot operators scooped up a large percentage of all copies during multiple drops, with some purchasing hundreds of CDs to a single shipping address. Meanwhile, the customer database became poisoned with tens of thousands of bot-driven purchases mixed with legitimate orders, making it difficult for the team to distinguish genuine buyers from bot-generated transactions.
Zoom in
The Vesal Security team monitored the events in real time, documenting how operators successfully purchased hundreds of CDs per user during the drops. These operators later shared screenshots of their success once the products shipped and were in their possession, ready for resale. None of the bot operators experienced order cancellations.
What Swifties were saying
As with previous limited-edition releases, fans took to Facebook, X, and Reddit to express their frustration when their orders failed to go through. Even those who logged on within seconds of the product going live on the Shopify store were surprised to find their carts empty at checkout.
Is this legal?
Botting is generally legal in the United States, with one exception: it is illegal to use bots to purchase tickets from ticket-selling websites. The Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act prohibits using bots to bypass security measures on sites selling tickets for public events like concerts or sports.
If Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift presale catastrophe taught us anything about the state of online ticket sales, it’s that the real market for live music experiences is not the market fans think they’re dealing with.U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.)
The same concept applies to non-ticketed items, where no federal legislation currently exists to regulate the use of bots in such transactions.
Next steps
If Taylor’s past “limited edition” releases are any predictor, bots will be ready and waiting to snap up the next drop too. With no laws in place to prevent this and limited enforcement likely, it falls to the business and technology sectors to develop effective solutions. Until security, marketing, engineering, and product teams can mirror the cooperation and internal communication cook groups use to plan their buying operations, they’ll continue to disappoint fans — and risk revenue-impacting problems, from surplus inventory to excessive returns to high customer churn.