Watch your deals: Bad actor (?) tried to hijack my Black Friday deal

Just a warning for other sellers so you are aware of this tactic.

We have a black Friday deal going and had 100 units reserved for it. I noticed that the deal ‘claimed percent’ was jumping very fast but no orders were flowing in. I suspected something fishy since this is not a very high volume item that would sell 10 pieces every 10 seconds.

I changed the deal units to 1000 just to see how far this will go. It stopped at around 250 units being claimed. So obviously someone purchased a 250 black-hat Amazon accounts for this to block our inventory during the deal.

Of course, none of those sales came through and the deal percent went low again after an hour (which also makes the deal look bad to real buyers).

In this case we were monitoring the deal and could react fast enough. I can imagine if that was not the case, our inventory would have been blocked and we would have lost all real sales.

Any theories/stories about these kind of tactics?