Even after more than a year, it’s still difficult to buy a new PlayStation or Xbox without assistance.
Flippers have become notorious for snatching up the fresh restocks offered online using ultra-fast buying bots, forcing everyone else to buy units off the secondary market at exorbitant, 100-dollar markups.
But, after delving into the console reselling underworld, I discovered that resellers aren’t the main issue. Instead, they are merely pawns of the industry’s true power brokers: the enterprising developers who sell these bots to aspiring flippers in the first place.
Dozens of “AIO resale bots” have emerged in recent years, promising prospective flippers a “all-in-one” service that can scoop up tons of sneakers, graphic cards, and consoles to power their own black market businesses.
They provide a set of tools that allow users to bypass the digital checkout infrastructure of retailers such as Walmart and Best Buy in an instant while carrying a large load of loot.
Most of these bots require an upfront payment as well as a recurring usage fee, implying that they are simply middlemen for the scalping industry at large. “Financial freedom is something the United States and all countries stand for. We’re all aiming for it in the end, not just resellers but consumers,” says Fuat, a German entrepreneur who is one of the partners behind the buying bot Dakoza, in a Discord call..
Dakoza’s pitch is straightforward. The bot allows users to transform their computers into an unrivalled price-gouging force of nature for an initial $300 fee and monthly $50 payments after that.
We see a trickle of receipts for Xbox Series X consoles, PS5s, and Nvidia graphics cards leak into a shark’s inventory like clockwork in a Dakoza UI demonstration plastered across its homepage. The service is tailored to retailers such as Target, Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart. Botting has been a staple of the reselling industry for at least five years, but Anton, another German who co-founded Dakoza and declined to give his full name for the story, believes that a combination of Covid boredom, mogul dreams, and overwhelming mainstream intrigue drew a generation of amateur hustlers into the ecosystem.
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