As people stay in lockdown, many are turning to next-gen gaming as means of entertainment. As a result, PS5s are in high demand. Some people have capitalized on this competitive market by using bots to quickly purchase consoles and re-sell them for a massive markup. There a couple different bots scalpers use for this.
The first bot of choice is called an AIO Bot or the all-in-one bot. AIO bots scan hundreds of websites every second to find available merchandise and are able to checkout and confirm the purchase at inhuman speeds. The other two bots works similarly, either scanning websites and notifying bot owners of available items, or even automatically putting an item on hold for bot owners.
While other industries have taken action to outlaw these bots, regulations have yet to hit the retail space. The problem is, these bot programs are growing at massive rates. It was calculated that these bots represent a 1 Million Pound investment, and likely see double the profit. Bot-based scalping operations are not unsophisticated, as people may see them. Rather, they are highly organized businesses with “marketing plans, with investments, with budgets, [and] getting as much PR coverage as [some cybersecurity firms].”
From the perspective of the seller, these bots are horrendous. They ruin the brand, crash websites, and often generate fraud. From a regulatory perspective, government officials are moving slow. Officials from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport are just now discussing this issue with the trade association relevant to video games. Given the inefficient and unfair market place bots create, it is likely they will receive the same regulations that ticket scalpers received. In the meantime, retailers are forced to come up with creative solutions.
Attached below are some small excerpt from the Wired Magazine Article:
But the pandemic has kicked these bots into overdrive, and it’s not just the result of more aggressive sales events and shopping being pushed online (you can’t, obviously, have a retail bot camp out in front of your local GAME store). Damaged supply chains have limited the stock of usually plentiful items, creating scarcity, and scarcity is what scalpers prey on. “We used to see niche groups of people targeting niche groups of things,” says Platt. “And now what we realize is they can target things that aren’t so niche, and they can make a lot of money. And that’s the real switch for us.”
“We proposed examining the principles behind Secondary Selling of Tickets legislation drafted to tackle unfair ticket touting as a possible route to prevent scalping,” says Chapman. “Given that experts in the cyber industry now predict the issue of scalping to grow across other important goods and services this year, we are looking at presenting a bill in Parliament on this matter so that we can further explore legislative options to protect consumers from this unfair practice.”
Overview by James O’Brien, Research Analyst at Mercator Advisory Group
