Scalper bots, also known as purchasing bots is getting out of control. The bot’s operators have tried to sell appointments for various government agencies for $100 in Israel. The appointments includes the applications of public services for passport renewal, Israeli Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Transport, National Insurance, Israel Post and the Israeli state Electricity Company.
During the pandemic situation, the bot was developed by a backlog of over 7,00,000 passport applications on the Ministry of the Interior in order to ease travel restrictions. And in order to help the travellers in the pandemic, the software creators made an appointment booking bot. Consequently, this bot was named as ‘GamkenBot’ which checks the availability for applications and the books it automatically. And for the booking purpose, the bot was made available publicly and the hackers took advantage of it. They changed every function of the bots for making money, by selling appointments to innocents.
Now, the state’s site MyVisit has made an effort to stop the developers by adding the feature of CAPTCHA on the booking page. However, the bot developers dodged CAPTCHA by adding CAPTCHA solving functionality.
