Lenders work to prevent autobots

MONEYTHING is planning to introduce velocity checks and lock outs on its peer-to-peer lending platform, to prevent autobots gaming the new and secondary market.

Ed Pearce, managing director of MoneyThing, said investors had raised issues about its new and secondary asset-backed business loans disappearing off the market very quickly due to automated trading.

Pearce said it is not a major problem, but it is not in the spirit of P2P.

The platform has put processes in place to stop the same transaction taking place within three seconds, meaning a user would now get an error message instead.

Read more: MoneyThing to allow pre-bids on loans          

“We have only noticed this from a couple of users,” Pearce told Peer-to-Peer Finance News.

“As platforms start to grow it is an inevitable thing that there will be users who try to game the system. We can use velocity checks similar to banks stopping cards when there is unusual activity.”

Other platforms, such as Saving Stream, have also said they are on the lookout for autobots.

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“We have not had any obvious issues with autobots being used but we are aware that investors on other platforms have said they have experienced some issues in this respect,” a spokesperson said.

“Our aim is to make property investing as fair as possible and any tool or programme that gives a person or organisation an unfair advantage should be discouraged.

“We’re looking into the fairest way to discourage it without penalising legitimate investors, but it is a very difficult issue to police. We would encourage all investors to let us know if they believe an autobot might be active.”

Read more: MoneyThing faces shortage of borrowers