An AI agent kept designer items on hold for hours by re-adding them every 20 minutes. Check how your clients' booking holds work

A hold timer that was fair for humans became a loophole the moment an agent could click for free all day.

What happened

On The RealReal, a secondhand luxury retailer, putting an item in your cart holds it for 20 minutes so nobody else can buy it. A Verge reporter told Meta's Muse agent to add the 10 newest listings from a brand to the cart and re-add them each time the hold expired. The agent did that all day, with no intent to buy, until the reporter stopped it.

After the story ran, The RealReal's CTO Luke Friang said the company updated its bot defense so it is now much harder for all agents to log in, add items to a cart and check out. Agents can still surface listings and send Muse users to product pages.

The same reporting notes Amazon blocked Muse from shopping its site, and a Target spokesperson said agents may reach one part of its site but not another. Meta said shopping is the most common Muse use case, with purchases averaging over $200, and 10 million people in the US downloaded the app in 40 days.

My take

Most small business systems I touch have a version of this hold: appointment slots held during booking, event seats, limited stock, quotes valid for 24 hours, free trial signups. They were designed around a human's patience. An agent has none to run out of.

Questions I would ask about every client flow that reserves something:

1. Can one account or email hold more than one or two items at a time?
2. What happens when the same account re-holds the same item again and again?
3. Is a hold free, or does it need a deposit or a verified login?
4. Are you alerted when one contact creates an unusual number of holds?

The fix does not have to be blocking agents. The RealReal still lets them browse. A simple pattern is to keep reading open and add friction only where an action takes something away from other customers: holding, booking or buying.

If you run booking in GoHighLevel, Calendly or a custom form, test it yourself. Try to book and cancel the same slot ten times and see what your system does.