Okay, we are well past the launch frenzy. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone. And the last-minute Christmas shopping craze is well behind us. So how come I still do not have a PlayStation 5? The answer seems clear. I refuse to pay a scalper double.

The recent scalping furor has generated quite a bit of press, most of it casting these opportunists as villains. Apparently, these people, who have no qualms about cutting to the front of a digital queue and bypassing quantity limitations on purchases, don't like the bad press they are receiving and are speaking out about it.
A man going only by Jordan spoke with Forbes, saying that he thinks the press coverage has been unfair.
"There seems to be A LOT of bad press on this incredibly valuable industry and I do not feel that it is justified, all we are acting as is a middleman for limited quantity items [sic]," he said.
Jordan co-founded a private group called The Lab, which charges people for advice on how to scalp products. This type of business is known as a "cook group." Jordan admitted that he picked up 25 PS5s last month and sold them for about £700 ($967) each. He justifies this practice by comparing it to the retail market.
"Essentially, every business resells their products," the scalper said. "Tesco, for example, buys milk from farmers for 26p or so per litre and sells it on for upwards of 70p per litre. No one ever seems to complain to the extent as they are currently doing towards ourselves."
 
It is probably not necessary to point out the flaw in his logic. Buying from the source at wholesale then selling it to the public at retail is far removed from unfairly snatching all of a store's stock at retail and selling it for double on eBay. The fallacy was not lost on Forbes either, which put the analogy to its readers for comment.
 
"He is deluded. He doesn't get he's another layer of profiteering in his own Tesco analogy. He's not Robin Hood," one of them said.
These "middlemen" are not even shy about admitting to using software to cheat purchasing systems. The Lab's other co-found, who goes by 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 and console scalpers are nothing new, but it has gone crazy in the last several months with a massive proliferation in bots used to bypass online queues and purchase-quantity checks. It's a problem only exacerbated by brick-and-mortar stores banning in-store sales in an attempt at crowd control during the pandemic.
Furthermore, with Sony, Microsoft, Nvidia, and other manufacturers struggling to get enough components to meet demand, it's not going to go away anytime soon. As such, it's not surprising that there have been talks of taking legal or regulatory measures to tackle the problem.
 
https://www.techspot.com/news/88603-scalpers-press-treats-them-unfairly-because-they-valuable.html
 
 
lol.... I do hope gov's do something about this
 
 

Yea i would beg to differ.

Valuable industry to eBay, sure. 

Hoggle
Not sure I would say it’s a valuable industry since if scalpers didn’t exist to sit on products then supply would be better. Every card for sell by a scalper on eBay is a gamer who doesn’t have a card.

Ain't that the truth!

Sorry...scalpers are losers!  They prey upon others, who want something so badly that they will pay their premiums...

It's also incredible that online stores have had such a problem implementing anti-scalping protection. I agree that scalpers suck but **** are stores doing? The only effective strategy seems to be in-person queues which aren't ideal for obvious reasons.

 
I'd comment directly to this, but my post would be censored and I'd probably receive a reprimand for breaking ToS.
 

Nereus
 
I'd comment directly to this, but my post would be censored and I'd probably receive a reprimand for breaking ToS.
 

Amen! 

They are parasites... I refuse to give them a dime as they have only help drive up prices and make things even more unavailable to everyone and are right behind the cryto miners on GPU's purchased even before they hit the market sitting in a shipping container.
For the first time in my life I have bought a pre-built system because of them. Refuse to give them a dime and got tired of playing the buy game with them and miners. I wish people would stop buying GPU's, other computer hardware and even consoles from these kinds of scum. 

With the bit of economic knowlage I have:
scalpers only exists because of wrong pricing of the sellers depending on free marketing
your economic is based on demand and offer, so if everyone sell at the sweet spot there demand and offer meet, there is no space for scalpers
but this would not end in a much better price for us, the consumers, cuz then, not the scalpers make there part of the Profit, the resellers will get the total Profit of it.
By the way: scalpers don't do different then any other reseller: buying things for less and sell them for more.
I wont say that scalpers are not parasites.
I say that all resellers are more or less parasites, because they make profit without adding value to the product.

It's also important to realize that scalpers also take away warranty support from the person who is buying for over finding it at retail. When you buy from an official retailer if it doesn't work out of the box you take it back with scalpers you are probably out of luck as stores don't return electronics without a receipt and the scalper isn't likely to want to refund anything. It can even take a store receipt to register a product for warranty work. How is that valuable? 

Ysbert
The pricing is not wrong, it's the very limited availability that is the problem.

economic basics: supply/demand
more demand -> higher price
less demand -> lower price
 
more supply -> lower price
less supply -> higher price
 
"limited availability" == less supply
still sell at the same price -> pricing is wrong
 
not that I am happy about it, but that's how economic work.

Brad_Hawthorne
 
Economics is not working right if all stock is systematically purchased in milliseconds by bots and not humans to corner the market and manipulate the price. If you're arguing that is working as intended I call BS on that. This is being done by people with enough money to force the outcome they want. They aren't building a bot system and buying all that stock with fake money.

I am not saying it is working right now! I say that the PRICE IS WRONG!
In a "perfect" economic is no wrong price.
 
yea there is a limited availability (less supply) and that it is bought by bots in a huge amount only means that here is huge demand.
Moreover "people with enough money" means that this demand also exists at a much higher price.
So yea the price is wrong.
in a working economy everybody would sell the the price they could make the maximum profit.
If this would happen nobody could but it at that price to sell it at a higher price... (because that would mean that the initial seller did not made maximum profit).
And because of this, yea Economic is not working right now. But the reason for this is not that there are scalpers, the reason is just that the sellers do not sell at the correct price for this situation.
 
(I had studied economics for a few years, but this are the basics you will learn in the first few weeks)

Scalpers are simply greed hungry. 

As long as you guys treat things which aren't needs as otherwise, I can't take your side.  We're not talking about toilet paper anymore, the subject here is gaming hardware.  Scalpers exist because people have no self control and "have to have", so they benefit from those folks willing to pay whatever to 'have to have'.  If you want to get rid of scalpers, manage your fellow gamers who can't control themselves, because it's their fault that a demand to take advantage of them exists.