The Cost of Bot Attacks: What a Day Without Bot Protection Could Cost Fintech Platforms

Fintech platforms face a massive automated threat every day. Over half of all web traffic is now driven by bots, and about one-third of that traffic comes from malicious “bad bots”. This means a significant chunk of visits hitting financial sites are not real customers at all; they’re automated scripts attempting fraud, scraping data, or testing stolen credentials. 

Financial institutions are among the top targets globally. In fact, the United States is the number one target region for bad bot traffic, and the financial services sector ranks as one of the most attacked industries (behind only travel, retail, and education). Banks and fintech companies also suffer the most API and account takeover attacks, as attackers focus on APIs and login systems to breach sensitive financial accounts. 

Automated bot attacks are costing businesses up to $116 billion every year. When combined with related API exploits, the annual losses climb as high as $186 billion worldwide. Large enterprises bear the brunt; organizations with over $1 billion in revenue are 2–3 times more likely to experience bot attacks than smaller firms. Fintech platforms, often dealing with high-value transactions and sensitive data, are prime targets.

Account takeover (ATO) fraud alone led to nearly $13 billion in losses in 2023, a huge portion of which can be attributed to bot-driven credential stuffing and other automated attacks. For individual victims, the losses can be devastating (the average person hit by an account takeover loses around $12,000), and for the financial platform, each compromised account or fraudulent transaction is a direct hit to the bottom line and reputation.

Infrastructure overhead: Paying for malicious traffic

One of the most immediate costs of unchecked bot activity is wasted infrastructure and bandwidth. Bad bots make up roughly 30%–37% of all internet traffic today. This means if your platform gets 100 million visits a month, tens of millions of those could be fake requests from bots. All those extra hits inflate server load, bandwidth usage, and cloud instance scaling, driving up your infrastructure bills with zero return on investment.

At scale, the impact is massive. KaBuM!, a leading e-commerce company, found that up to one-third of their entire infrastructure capacity was being consumed by malicious bot traffic. Their auto-scaling servers would spin up additional instances to handle waves of bot requests, effectively burning money to accommodate attackers. 

If a fintech platform goes a day without bot protection, a similar surge of bot activity could force emergency scaling or even cause slowdowns/outages, all of which come with a price tag. Downtime is especially expensive: industry analysis by Gartner estimates that an hour of downtime can cost anywhere from $140,000 to $540,000 per hour in lost business. Even short of complete downtime, bots can degrade site performance, and every one-second page delay can drop conversion rates by 7%, meaning fewer successful transactions. In financial services, a slow or crashing website during peak trading or banking hours could directly translate to lost fee revenue and frustrated customers.

Many businesses still lack adequate bot filtering. DataDome’s 2024 Global Bot Security Report found that 65% of companies were completely unprotected against basic bot attacks. Going without any bot management in place means absorbing those costs and accepting the performance tradeoffs that come with them. If your fintech platform’s annual infrastructure budget is, for example, $5 million, and one-third of traffic is malicious, you could be flushing a significant portion of that spend (potentially $1.5+ million) on serving bad actors. Put simply, one day without bot protection is a day of pouring money into server capacity for attackers’ benefit, a cost no business should accept.

Operational drag: Staff hours spent fighting bots

Bots don’t just strain infrastructure, they drain your team’s time. Without strong protection, IT, security, fraud, and ops teams become the last line of defense, stuck investigating spikes, tweaking firewall rules, and chasing down traffic anomalies.

The hours add up fast. At KaBuM!, a leading e-commerce company, engineers were spending 2–3 hours every day just managing bot activity—roughly two weeks of work each month lost to manual mitigation. And these aren’t idle hours; they’re pulled from strategic projects and core business priorities.

The hidden cost of bots is a loss of opportunity. Take away your defenses, and your best people are suddenly in firefighting mode. Overtime, burnout, emergency response—it all piles up quickly.

Every hour spent reacting to bots is an hour not spent building, improving, or serving customers. And in fintech, where speed and stability matter, that’s a cost few teams can afford.

“When you clean the top of the funnel, every downstream layer gets smarter. They’re seeing clearer traffic and can better distinguish between legitimate and abusive behavior. That improves our visibility, helps our models learn faster, and reduces friction for real users.”

– Dan Ayash, Director, Advanced Cybersecurity Solutions at PayPal

Lost revenue from content theft and scraping

Not all bots go after accounts. Some quietly scrape your content, causing long-term revenue loss. Fintech platforms often publish high-value assets: market data, financial dashboards, research, pricing, or educational tools. Without protection, bots can siphon this content around the clock, republishing it elsewhere and undercutting your traffic, brand, and business.

The impact adds up. Content scraping alone can cost platforms an estimated 2% of annual revenue—millions in lost ad dollars, subscriptions, or conversions. This doesn’t just mean stolen content, it also means lost audience. If users can get your data elsewhere, they will.

Scrapers also strain infrastructure. A wave of them hitting during peak hours can slow your site or cause outages, costing transactions and driving customers away. Nearly 10% of users won’t return after a poor experience.

Even one day without bot defenses can skew analytics, drain revenue, and erode the value of what you’ve built. For data-rich fintech platforms, protecting your content is protecting your business.

Fraud and abuse: Direct financial losses from bot attacks

Some of the most immediate and costly impacts of weak bot defenses come from fraud. Fintech platforms are prime targets, as successful attacks often convert directly into money.

Credential stuffing & ATOs: Bots use stolen credentials to break into user accounts. If successful, they can drain funds or steal sensitive data. ATO fraud hit $13B in 2023, with average victim losses around $12K. And now, regulators, especially in the EU, are imposing steep fines for failing to prevent it.

Carding & payment fraud: Bots test stolen credit cards at scale, leading to fraudulent charges and chargebacks that can quickly add up. A surge in fraud can also trigger higher transaction fees or partner suspensions.

Denial-of-Service: Some bots aim to overwhelm. A coordinated DDoS attack can take platforms offline during critical windows, costing hundreds of thousands per hour, eroding trust, and inviting compliance scrutiny.

“A denial of service attack could cost our business hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of losses or damages, so it’s hard to know exactly how much DataDome are saving us—hopefully we will never have to find out!” 

– Mike Anderson, CTO at Tap Global

API Abuse: Fintech APIs, especially those supporting open banking, are attractive targets for bots. Without protection, attackers can exploit them to scrape sensitive data, trigger unauthorized transactions, or flood systems with traffic. These attacks can strain infrastructure, expose customer information, and lead to unintended behavior that’s costly to fix. Even short windows of exposure can rack up expenses and erode trust.

“To fight AI-driven bots, you have to understand what they’re trying to do, not just who they are. That is what DataDome helps us do.”

– Dan Ayash, Director, Advanced Cybersecurity Solutions at PayPal

The bottom line: bot-driven fraud can drain revenue fast. And beyond the money, there’s the harder loss: customer trust. Once it’s broken, it’s not easily repaired.

Hidden costs: Reputation, compliance, & the competitive edge

Even a single day without bot protection can lead to long-term damage.

Trust is the first casualty. A bot-driven incident like an account takeover, data leak, or unexpected outage can quickly shake user confidence. Customers need to know their accounts are safe and services are reliable, and once that trust is broken, it’s not easily repaired.

Then comes compliance risk. Regulators are cracking down, especially in the EU, where a single ATO-related breach can lead to multi-million-dollar fines. Even outside those regions, legal fallout from bot-related incidents is costly and time-consuming.

There’s also the competitive toll. Scrapers can undercut your pricing. Your team gets stuck firefighting while others move faster. And if bots skew your analytics, your decisions suffer.

These risks compound. They may not hit the balance sheet right away, but they erode growth, speed, and customer loyalty over time. For fintech platforms, the hidden costs of going unprotected are anything but minor.

Bot protection is cheaper than the alternative

Strong bot protection costs far less than going without it. Bots drain revenue from every angle: fraud losses, infrastructure waste, scraped content, potential for data leaks, and the constant pull on internal teams. And while a defense solution has a price tag, that cost is often recouped in what it saves. Many teams find it quickly pays for itself in reduced server load and fewer hours spent fighting fires.

If you already have a bot solution, it’s worth asking: is it doing enough? If bots are still slipping through or your teams are still manually intervening, the hidden costs are adding up. Even short gaps in protection can introduce avoidable risk and unnecessary overhead.

Bot protection is an investment in your revenue, your customers, and your ability to operate without disruption. The cost of skipping it, even for a day, is simply too high.

Curious what effective bot protection could save your business? Book a demo to see how DataDome helps fintech platforms reduce costs, reclaim resources, and protect revenue.