More than a year on, it\u2019s still hard to buy a new PlayStation or Xbox without some help. Flippers have become notorious for snatching up the fresh restocks offered online with the help of ultra-fast buying bots, forcing everyone else to buy units off the secondary market for egregious, 100-dollar markups. But after delving into the console reselling underworld, I was shocked to learn that resellers aren\u2019t the primary problem. Instead, they\u2019re merely the pawns of the true<\/em> powerbrokers of the industry: the enterprising developers selling these bots to aspiring flippers in the first place. <\/p>\n

Dozens of what are known as \u201cAIO resale bots\u201d have popped up in recent years, offering prospective flippers an \u201call-in-one\u201d service that can snatch up tons of sneakers, graphic cards, and consoles in order to power their own black market businesses. They offer a suite of tools that allow users to pass through the digital checkout infrastructure of retailers like Walmart and Best Buy in an instant with a heavy load of plunder in tow. Most of these bots are saddled with an upfront payment and a recurring usage fee, which means they\u2019re simply the middlemen for the scalping industry writ large. The programmers all believe that they\u2019re fighting the good fight; after all, what\u2019s more American than supply and demand?<\/p>\n