“There were a lot of very disappointed online retail clients over Christmas,” says Matt Gracey-McMinn. “They were essentially victims of bot attacks.” Shoppers hoping to buy electronic goods over the internet experienced premium stock scarcity on legitimate vendor sites and were forced to redirect their trade to re-seller sites. This is where they were exposed to extortionate price uplifts that exploited the pre-Christmas demand increase.

None of this is necessarily illegal, says the head of Threat Research at Manchester-based Netacea, but the power of scalper bots (that digitally jump the customer queue to snap up bulk stock of in-demand products) is now becoming a tool for the murky world of organised crime. “It’s got to the point where the US government is exploring a bill to legislate against the use of bots in purchasing electronics.”

Thirty-year-old Gracey-McMinn says the fact that in most cases such scalper bots are legal is “part of the problem...