Bots didn’t take the summer off.
Q2 2025 bot attack trends reveal three dominant tactics: AI scraping, scalper bots, and stolen travel accounts.
Here’s how attackers made money and what defenders can do about it.
1) AI Scraping: From Background Noise to Business Risk
AI scrapers aren’t just crawling, they’re hammering. In Kasada’s Q2 Threat Report, over 120 million requests were tracked from AI scraper user agents, with OpenAI responsible for the majority. In June alone, OpenAI sent more than 56 million requests, vastly outpacing every other self-identified AI bot. Retail and real estate were hit the hardest, underscoring how quickly “background noise” has become a strategic risk.
The stakes are clear. Scrapers trigger cloud auto-scaling, inflating bandwidth and infrastructure bills while draining performance. For industries with dynamic pricing, scraping distorts demand signals and erodes margins. And because these bots ignore robots.txt, they expose businesses to regulatory and ESG scrutiny.
The legal battles show how messy enforcement can be. Ryanair has spent more than a decade fighting online travel agencies over unauthorized scraping of its flight data. Even with courts in multiple jurisdictions siding with Ryanair, the costs of litigation have been significant, and operational disruption continues. At the same time, new AI entrants like Meta AI have been observed scraping real estate listings in the U.S., raising fresh questions about compliance and attribution.
What to do:
- Define your policy on acceptable vs. unwanted scraping.
- Enforce with client-side telemetry, invisible proof-of-execution, and anomaly detection — no CAPTCHAs required.
- Track adversary intel. Scrapers rotate proxies and persist until stopped.
2) Scalper Bots: the Labubu Lesson
Scarcity sells, and bots know it.
In Q2, Kasada observed 3,160 bot checkouts for The Monsters’ “Labubu” collectible. Nearly 70% of those checkouts came from a single retailer, and just two cook groups orchestrated the majority of the activity. Resale listings flipped stock at 25–127% markups.
The playbook isn’t new — GPUs, sneakers, and concert tickets all follow the same script. Bots drain inventory in seconds, loyal customers are left frustrated, and brands take the reputational hit for problems they didn’t cause.
Scarcity marketing only makes it worse. The return of blind-box collectibles, limited-edition drops, and viral hype cycles creates the perfect storm for scalper communities. These groups don’t just swoop in opportunistically; they share tools, scripts, and playbooks across Discord and Telegram, ensuring that every new hype product becomes an immediate target
What to do:
- Enforce session integrity from the very first request.
- Use frictionless bot challenges to keep humans moving and block automation.
- Monitor cook group chatter to anticipate which SKUs are next in line.
3) Summer‑Travel Fraud: Accounts as Currency
As vacation planning spiked, so did demand for stolen travel credentials. Accommodation accounts surged 48% quarter-over-quarter, with revenue up nearly 200% as average resale prices doubled to $8.27. The number of shops selling these accounts more than doubled. Airline accounts also sold in volume — 12k in Q2 — but at a far higher price: $22.36 each, more than six times the value of retail accounts even after a price drop.
These accounts aren’t just logins anymore — they’re currency. With loyalty points, elite status, and booking power attached, they command a premium underground. Meanwhile, award aggregation tools like LOYALTYPRO scrape availability data at scale, sometimes taking systems offline and manipulating dynamic pricing models
The data reinforces what we’ve seen quarter after quarter: account takeover remains the top automated threat across industries. Retail, quick-service restaurants, and webmail alone made up 72% of all account sales Kasada tracked in Q2. And while some industries fluctuate, credentials tied to travel and retail consistently top the charts for adversary monetization.
Legal fights aren’t keeping up either. Ryanair’s long-running battle against OTAs shows that even with favorable rulings, enforcement is slow, costly, and rarely enough to deter attackers.
What to do:
- Treat account takeover as an enduring top risk.
- Defend against credential stuffing with client-side validation, session analysis, and risk-based detection.
- Proactively monitor for compromised credentials to cut off resale before it spreads.
Bottom line:
Q2’s bot activity revealed three dominant tactics. AI scrapers created over 120 million requests, straining infrastructure and distorting pricing models. Scalper bots drained inventory from hype-driven drops like Labubu, frustrating customers and inflating resale markets. Stolen travel accounts surged in value, fueling the underground economy. Together, these trends show why businesses need layered, client-side defenses that stop bots at the very first request.
