Scentbird Stops Carding Fraud & Credential Stuffing, Saves Costs & Time With DataDome

Scentbird is a perfume subscription service that helps members find their signature fragrance without having to leave the comfort of their home. The popular website was targeted by content scraping, credential stuffing, and carding fraud attacks, which created unnecessary work in multiple departments and drove up the company’s costs. Scentbird chose DataDome for its ease of integration, detailed dashboard data, and responsive support. The website is now efficiently protected from all types of automated attacks, and Scentbird’s teams can focus on business-related activities.

The Problem: Bot Traffic Drives Up Costs and Threatens Account Security

As an online beauty industry leader with several hundred thousand subscribers, Scentbird is an obvious target for all kinds of bot-driven activity, from scraping to credential stuffing and carding attacks.

“Our product pages contain a lot of information about perfumes, user reviews, and other rich content, which was targeted by scraper bots. It was annoying, but not that big of a deal,” says Andrei Rebrov, CTO and Co-Founder of Scentbird. “On the other end of the spectrum, however, we also had credential stuffing attacks and automated payment fraud, which was our biggest issue.”

All that automated activity, which Andrei estimates to make up 20-30% of Scentbird’s total traffic, created a great deal of unnecessary work and extra costs within the company.

““When scrapers were causing traffic spikes and load on the servers, it was mainly our site reliability engineers or me who would have to update our firewall rules. But when it came to fraudulent orders, they generated a very long tail of activities that affected many departments. We had to communicate to customers, issue refunds, deal with insurance, manage the financial impact, and so on and so forth. It was an unpleasant experience,” Andrei acknowledges.

“In terms of costs, we pay our cloud providers for all traffic that hits our servers, so automated traffic drives up the bill unnecessarily. And for fraudulent orders, we have to pay merchant fees, cover the cost of lost goods, and sometimes pay chargebacks.”

The Solution: Easy Setup, Efficient Protection, Rich Traffic Data

For some time, the Scentbird team fought off undesirable traffic with the help of their WAF and manual interventions. However, the approach was time-consuming and increasingly inefficient. They tested a couple of bot protection tools, but found that they lacked both flexibility and transparency.

Finally, as serendipity would have it, Andrei found the solution to Scentbird’s bot issues at the AWS Summit New York event.

“I saw a stand saying ‘We help fight online fraud and account takeover.’ Those things were on top of my mind, so we had a conversation, and the DataDome team showed me the interface and how it worked,” he explains. “I really liked how easy it was to implement and configure.”

No sooner said than done—the next day, Andrei installed the DataDome Cloudflare module on the website himself and started the free trial. In the dashboard, he could instantly see a wide variety of malicious bot activity: stealing content, looking for vulnerabilities, trying out credit cards, and attempting to access sensitive information behind the login section.

The DataDome dashboard showed a wide variety of threats, including this cyclical attack on the checkout endpoint.

A week later, the contract was signed and the protection activated.

“The seamless integration with Cloudflare was definitely a winning factor,” Andrei comments. “We’re a small team and everyone’s time is precious, so the simpler a tool is to implement, configure, and maintain, the more attractive it is to us. Those are my favorite tools: the ones that just work and solve the problem.”

The team also appreciated the transparency and detailed information in the DataDome dashboard, which enables users to fine-tune the detection rules themselves.

“We can dissect our traffic and block or allow exactly what we need,” Andrei attests. “DataDome obviously does the bulk of detection and blocking, but the ability to explore our traffic data and create custom rules—for example to allow specific traffic from specific partners—is great.”

The Results: Peace of Mind, Time Saved, Lower Costs

What has changed for Scentbird since they implemented the DataDome solution?

“I can sleep better at night,” Andrei laughs. “Honestly, that’s the truth. In e-commerce, the number of fraudulent orders and cyberattacks have gone up like crazy since the pandemic, and it’s impossible to ignore bot threats. The other day, I saw that there are now ‘bots as a service’ offers that allow people to rent a botnet for various kinds of attacks. With the swipe of a card, they have a pretty large botnet, and that’s scary. We have to be prepared for that.”

“So, while we can never completely eliminate the possibility of a fraud attack, DataDome takes the pressure off, and we can continue to work on our core business. We don’t have to become cybersecurity experts.”

An additional effect of the protection is that many attackers simply give up trying, which means that the number of attacks have been significantly reduced.

“It’s very interesting. In the early days, we saw a couple of scraping, fake account creation, or fraud attacks almost every day. Now, we barely see one every two, three, or four days,” Andrei observes. “And either way, we have shifted our attention from trying to block attacks to more business-related activities.”

In conclusion, he commends the collaboration with the DataDome team.

“It’s not just the tool, it’s also the people we work with,” he says. “For example, when we experienced a big attack right at the time of the free trial, they were really helpful in implementing things slightly earlier than the contract said, and the team was there to help prevent it. And whenever we have had a question or an issue, we’ve been able to get a clear answer. A successful collaboration always goes beyond just having a good tool, and I really appreciate it.”