It's the weekend, I'm hungover so it's time for a rant. If you intend to come in here defending the practice of scalping take it somewhere else.
Browse any of the major retailers, Amazon, Argos, Curry's etc and you soon see that getting hold of either the PS5 or Xbox Series X is damn near impossible and whenever stock does arrive, it's gone within seconds and websites are brought to their knees by massive spikes in traffic. These bots are being used by scalpers to buy up the stock so they can resell at massively nflated prices.
For Xbox Series X it's typically £100 over the RRP, for PS5 expect to shell out between £200 to £300 over RRP, also beware of the numerous scammers, who don't even have stock but are cashing in all the same, ebay seems to be their platform of choice but Gumtree and Facebook marketplace is rife with it as well. On ebay I have developed a fairly simple spot the scammer method by checking a few things on listings.
1 - account age, an awful lot of the accounts are created recently and tend to disappear after making a sale. Related to this, we have alt accounts, these are usually easy to spot as they often copy paste the exact wording of the main account and reuse pictures as well, for this also check the location, this indicates someone trying to get around selling limits.
2 - stock images and/or screenshots of preorders, both of these are red flag events firstly because they likely don't even have the stock, also in the rare event you get a dumbfuck who makes themselves identifiable, be weary as retailers have started pulling the rug out from under scalpers and deservedly so.
3 - CASH ON COLLECTION only sellers, usually giving out a phone number while they're at it.First - taking the conversation beyond ebay's own messaging platform goes against the TOS. Second they are probably going to delete the listing afterwards to get out of paying sellers fees. I would strongly consider reporting these sellers to ebay.
In conclusion fuck you scalpers, you should all be ashamed of yourselves, you have screwed over a lot of people.
Ok rant done, that's enough armchair detective from me, I'm going to go shake this hangover, enjoy your weekend, ERA.
Browse any of the major retailers, Amazon, Argos, Curry's etc and you soon see that getting hold of either the PS5 or Xbox Series X is damn near impossible and whenever stock does arrive, it's gone within seconds and websites are brought to their knees by massive spikes in traffic. These bots are being used by scalpers to buy up the stock so they can resell at massively nflated prices.
For Xbox Series X it's typically £100 over the RRP, for PS5 expect to shell out between £200 to £300 over RRP, also beware of the numerous scammers, who don't even have stock but are cashing in all the same, ebay seems to be their platform of choice but Gumtree and Facebook marketplace is rife with it as well. On ebay I have developed a fairly simple spot the scammer method by checking a few things on listings.
1 - account age, an awful lot of the accounts are created recently and tend to disappear after making a sale. Related to this, we have alt accounts, these are usually easy to spot as they often copy paste the exact wording of the main account and reuse pictures as well, for this also check the location, this indicates someone trying to get around selling limits.
2 - stock images and/or screenshots of preorders, both of these are red flag events firstly because they likely don't even have the stock, also in the rare event you get a dumbfuck who makes themselves identifiable, be weary as retailers have started pulling the rug out from under scalpers and deservedly so.
3 - CASH ON COLLECTION only sellers, usually giving out a phone number while they're at it.First - taking the conversation beyond ebay's own messaging platform goes against the TOS. Second they are probably going to delete the listing afterwards to get out of paying sellers fees. I would strongly consider reporting these sellers to ebay.
In conclusion fuck you scalpers, you should all be ashamed of yourselves, you have screwed over a lot of people.
Ok rant done, that's enough armchair detective from me, I'm going to go shake this hangover, enjoy your weekend, ERA.
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