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WTF ?! Okay, we’re well past the launch frenzy. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over. And the last minute Christmas shopping craze is well behind us. So how come I still don’t have a PlayStation 5? The answer seems clear. I refuse to pay for a double scalper.
The recent scalping fury has generated quite a bit of press, with most of these opportunists being bad guys. Apparently, those people, who have no qualms about stepping into the front of a digital queue and getting around quantity limits on purchases, don’t like the bad press they get and talk about it.
A man passing only by Jordan spoke to Forbes, saying he thought the media coverage was unfair.
“There seems to be a LOT of bad press on this incredibly valuable industry and I don’t think it is warranted, just as we are acting as a go-between for limited quantity items [sic],” he said.
Jordan co-founded a private group called The Lab, which asks people for advice on how to scalp products. This type of business is known as a “cook’s group”. Jordan admitted to buying 25 PS5s last month and selling them for around £ 700 ($ 967) each. He justifies this practice by comparing it to the retail market.
“Essentially every business resells their product,” the scalper said. “Tesco, for example, buys milk from farmers for around 26 pence a liter and sells it for over 70 pence a liter. No one ever seems to complain as much about us as they do now.”
It is probably not necessary to point out the flaw in its logic. Buying wholesale and then selling it to the retail public is far from unfairly seizing all the inventory in a retail store and selling it for double on eBay. The error was also not lost on Forbes, who submitted the analogy to his readers for comment.
“He’s cheated. He doesn’t get it, that’s another layer of profit in his own Tesco analogy. He’s not Robin Hood,” one said.
These “intermediaries” do not even hesitate to admit that they use software to deceive the purchasing systems. The Lab’s other co-found, who goes through Regan, shared screenshots (above) of the bot they use, called Velox. Regan said in some cases the program could complete a purchase in under three seconds. The software can also bypass 3D Secure, a credit card authentication process required in the UK.
Hardware scalpers and consoles aren’t new, but they’ve gone crazy in recent months with a massive proliferation of bots being used to bypass online queues and purchase quantity checks. It’s a problem that is only exacerbated by physical stores banning in-store sales in an attempt to control crowds during the pandemic.
Plus, with Sony, Microsoft, Nvidia, and other manufacturers struggling to get enough components to meet demand, this isn’t going away anytime soon. As such, it’s not surprising that there have been discussions about taking legal or regulatory action to tackle the problem.
Image Credit: Consoles by Jack Skeens, Velox by Janhoi Mcgregor
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