How To Use Bots To Buy Ps5
Looking to Buy a PS5? These PS5 Bots May Be Able to Help.
At this very moment, there are millions of excited gamers out there who want a PlayStation 5 and cannot get one. And, at least according to a few of them, it’s all software developer Kevin Hirczy’s fault.
Hirczy, who lives in Austria, is the programmer behind the Twitter account @iloveps_5, a bot account that crawls online retailers and tweets when one of them makes more PS5s available for sale.
Hirczy’s quickly hacked solution has helped a lot of human shoppers reach a retailer’s website fast enough to buy the system before an army of other buyers — most likely bots programmed to make such a purchase — got there first.
“Sometimes, people [message me to] say thank you, and some are like, ‘I wanted to buy one for my son, and thanks to you, I was able to get one. ’ That always makes me happy, ” Hirczy told me.
Others aren’t so lucky. Why, asked one disgruntled user in an email to Hirczy around Christmastime, did he insist on building a PS5-themed Twitter bot without guaranteeing the bot would lead to a successful purchase?
This notion is hilarious, for the record. But it also says something about the heightened drama and general confusion surrounding the PS5 drop in November and subsequent scramble for the limited stock. At many online retailers, the consoles would sell out within seconds of their release. How could anyone click through the checkout process fast enough to get one, some shoppers wondered?
What is a PS5 Bot? The PS5 is one of the hottest gaming consoles on the market right now and it’s almost impossible to purchase one- thanks to bots. A PS5 bot is a software program designed to purchase as many PS5s as possible in a matter of seconds. These programs, usually run by scalpers who then turn around and sell the Playstations for four, five or even 10 times the original price, have been incredibly successful at keeping limited release items from the hands of individual nsumers with an interest in expensive sneakers already knew the answer. The rival shoppers weren’t other video-game-playing humans, but automated scripts trained to quickly buy goods online. For any product with a limited supply and very high demand — like rare Air Jordans, graphics cards or gaming consoles — bots were a strategic way for scalpers to bypass other consumers and, hopefully, turn a profit on the resale.
This harsh economic reality made my fiancé sad. Why were upstanding citizens like himself stuck refreshing the pages of Walmart’s website while people with programming know-how simply had bots do that work for them?
That’s a loaded question.
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Image: TwitterWho Is Using Bots to Buy All the PS5s?
First things first: The people using bots to buy and resell PS5s probably aren’t standalone coders. They’re professional scalpers, and someone sold them a bot.
Either that, or Hari Nagarajan might have given them one for free.
Nagarajan is the creator and maintainer of the open-source buybot Fairgame. As its name suggests, the software is free for anyone to download — and requires only basic knowledge of the coding language Python to deploy. This, according to its GitHub page, helps everyday shoppers compete with the PS5 scalping bots on their own turf.
Nagarajan, who by day is an engineer at Amazon Web Services, decided to build the bot after trying and failing to manually buy a Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card last September. Within a few moments of release, the cards were sold out, and he immediately started seeing them pop up on eBay for almost four times the retail price. When he clicked on the sellers, their other listings — largely expensive streetwear — instantly gave them away as professional scalpers.
It was, according to Nagarajan, “really annoying. ”
That was a Wednesday or Thursday, he recalled. He stayed up all night Friday building a “Nvidia bot, ” and by Saturday, it was up and running. The next time Nvidia released the cards, he bought one easily, and he put the bot’s code on GitHub so other people could use it.
“I made a Discord server just in case someone had any questions. And I didn’t look at it for like the entire day. And then there were 1, 000 people in there, ” Nagarajan said.
“The person using one of these open-source bots to get themselves their PlayStation, they’re not the ones taking your PlayStation. It’s the people you’ll see in your local Facebook marketplace, or Craigslist, with 20 PlayStations in their garage. ”
From there, he and other developers went on to build buybots for BestBuy, EVGA and Amazon, and, when the PS5 dropped in November, their audience broadened considerably.
For people on the market for a buybot, Fairgame had some strong selling points.
First, it was free. On sites like Bot Broker, similar software goes for upward of $8, 000. Those programs are far more user friendly, Nagarajan said, with easier installation, better customer support and simpler interfaces. But, for plenty of people, saving the money was worth the more challenging installation process: Even after its heyday, Fairgame gets 5, 000 unique visitors from Google searches alone every day, Nagarajan told me.
Second, it worked. Even in the first days after the Nvidia bot went up, Nagarajan saw user after user report they’d successfully bought graphics cards. At one point, Fairgame developers added a reaction rule to their Discord server, encouraging members to leave a reaction if they completed a purchase. Out of 3, 000 members, 18 percent reported a successful checkout. Factoring in which cards they purchased and a representative scalper listing price for each product, those users had saved $350, 000 as of December 3, the Fairgame contributors calculated. (Estimates of scalpers’ profits from PS5 sales hover around $19 million. )
And last, maybe an open-source bot available to anyone didn’t feel quite so much like cheating the system. Its name had the word “fair” in it, after all, and its repo home page declared in bold letters: “If everyone is botting, then no one is botting. ”
“The person using one of these open-source bots to get themselves their PlayStation, they’re not the ones taking your PlayStation. ” Nagarajan said. “That’s who you should be mad at. ”
Image: TwitterWhat About PS5 Restock Twitter Bots?
For shoppers not inclined to overpay a scalper or unleash a buybot, there are also Twitter bots that tweet when retailers make scarce items available.
Hirczy’s availability bot was originally for himself — he wanted to get a Nvidia graphics card with minimal drama, so he took three hours to train a script to crawl retailers’ websites.
“I don’t want to press F5 all day long, ” he explained. “That’s terrible. ”
But something gave him pause: If he, a programmer, had access to that information, shouldn’t everyone else?
“If the bot reports a false positive, they are like: ‘Your bot is shit. You are shit. ’”
When Hirczy eventually made an availability bot for PS5 stock, he posted about it on Reddit and gained 5, 000 followers overnight — the account now has 26, 000 followers. He also made the code open source, so other people could create their own Twitter bots. Hirczy was able to buy the graphics card he wanted, as well as PS5s for himself and a friend, and even started making some money from affiliate links.
But there was trouble in paradise. He ended up removing the bot’s code from GitHub after some users adjusted the polling frequency to less than five seconds, which would likely damage shop servers by overwhelming them with traffic. But keeping bad bots at bay isn’t easy. He still sees plenty of rogue bot accounts — like this German one — advertising fake PS5 drops with links that turn out to be affiliate marketing for unrelated products.
He also sometimes struggles to maintain the large Twitter and Discord communities that popped up around his projects. Scalpers infiltrate the server, looking for willing customers, and he has to kick them off. Other members ask the same questions over and over (Hirczy does not know and will never know when the next batch of PS5s will drop). People also get mad at him.
“They don’t care about my intentions behind it. They just care about if they can buy something, ” he said. “And if the bot reports a false positive, they are like: ‘Your bot is shit. ’”
It’s hard out here for a PS5 bot-maker.
Image: TwitterWhose Fault Is This?
For retailers, there’s no difference — at least in terms of revenue — between bot customers and human ones. And that, according to Hirczy, is an “absolutely valid” argument. After all, these retailers have never explicitly courted scalpers or asked for bot business.
But many of them haven’t meaningfully addressed the issue, either.
The week that Nagarajan made his Nvidia bot, for instance, the company changed its checkout process.
“They said they were going to beef up security and get real, right? ” Nagarajan said. “Then they added a CAPTCHA. ”
Within two hours, he and other members of his Discord had built and released a workaround that allowed bots to continue buying from Nvidia, he said. Later, Fairgame contributors realized that Nvidia hadn’t properly secured its purchase API, so bots or bad actors could make purchases directly from the back end without interacting with any of the website’s front end.
Eventually, Nvidia stopped selling products on its site, opting instead to work with Best Buy.
“The question to ask is, when people are scalping using these bots, is that actually limiting the supply? Or was the supply already limited before they were scalping? ”
Other retailers had more effective responses. EVGA switched to a queue system, in which shoppers would sign up for whatever graphics card they wanted before the release. Then, the company would authenticate each user to establish they were indeed human. When the cards dropped, each queued customer would get an email and have a few hours to make their purchase. After this change went live, the Fairgame maintainers removed the EVGA bot from the project’s repo.
German consumer electronics chain MediaMarkt, meanwhile, implemented a cap on PS5 purchases to prevent scalping bots from buying up too much inventory.
“I saw some screenshots on Twitter and everything where people bought, I don’t know, 50 or 60 PlayStations, ” Hirczy said. “That should not be possible with a product that is so hard to get, in my opinion. ”
But perhaps bot traffic is the symptom, not the problem. Scalpers are willing to pay thousands of dollars for buybots because they make that money back reselling items people really want. That only works if products have very low supply, which depends on the number of products manufacturers deliver — and supply-chain issues like the cost and availability of component parts.
“The question to ask is, when people are scalping using these bots, is that actually limiting the supply? Or was the supply already limited before they were scalping? ” Nagarajan said.
Image: TwitterWhat’s Next for Bots — and Their Creators
Unless manufacturers fix supply shortages, curbing the bot market will depend on retailers beefing up cybersecurity. Bot money may be just as good as human money, but consumer goodwill still matters, Nagarajan noted. Maybe it would take scalpers targeting necessities in low supply — like face masks or water — for retailers to take the situation seriously, he mused.
“In Austria and in Europe last year, toilet paper was sold out everywhere, ” Hirzcy said. “I probably could have started a toilet paper bot. ”
Barring a toilet-paper-bot apocalypse, though, the situation will likely stay the same: Scalpers scooping up consoles, the rest of us trying to beat them to it.
But what about people like Nagajaran, who fall somewhere in the middle?
Even in the beginning, he told me, working on Fairgame felt like a necessary evil.
“We were like: ‘Ideally, we shouldn’t have to make this. Like, this shouldn’t exist, ’” he said.
When someone in their Discord server told them a scalping group had switched to using Fairgame because it worked so well, at first, Nagarajan and the other contributors celebrated. But later, he felt less confident: “Wow, this is actually part of the problem too. ”
By the time a new member showed up on the Discord server complaining that someone had sold them the Fairgame bot for $50 — and attempting to dox the alleged seller — Nagarajan had seen enough. He stepped back from maintaining Fairgame.
“If I knew that it would end up like this, I’m not sure I would have made this bot, ” he said.
As for Hirczy, he said he’d build another bot, if that’s what it took to get a tough-to-buy product. But he hopes that, someday, PS5s will simply be available, and he can stop validating shop crawlers and moderating Discord channels for hours each week. For him, successfully buying a PS5 was only the beginning.
“It didn’t change my life or anything, ” he said. “Yeah, the bot is still up and running, because it helps people. I’m happy about that. But people take a lot of these things far too seriously. ”
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Xbox Series X and PS5 scalper bots aren’t illegal, but they soon could be
Members of Parliament have urged the government to take steps to make illegal the use of online bots to buy sought-after games consoles to sell on for profit.
Shortages of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles are due to a combination of a myriad of production issues and the success of scalpers in snapping up supplies and offering them for double the retail price on the secondary market.
Douglas Chapman MP, of the SNP, told Sky News that the practice “seems to me a total scam” and said that the practice reeked of “profiteering”.
A letter inviting the government to bring forth legislative proposals that would see to the ban of using automated bots, in a similar way that the resale of concert and sports tickets are illegal, has been posted on the government website. The text of the motion has been signed by 32 MPs thus far, from right across the political spectrum, and reads:
“That this House believes that new releases of gaming consoles and computer components should be available to all customers at no more than the Manufacturer’s Recommended Retail Price, and not be bought in bulk by the use of automated bots which often circumvent maximum purchase quantities imposed by the retailer; calls on the Government to bring forward legislative proposals similar to those introduced for the secondary selling of tickets, thereby prohibiting the resale of gaming consoles and computer components at prices greatly above Manufacturer’s Recommended Retail Price and furthermore this House; and further calls on the Government to bring forward legislative proposals making the resale of goods purchased using an automated bot an illegal activity, thereby denying unscrupulous vendors the chance to make themselves vast profits at the expense of genuine gamers and computer users, while also deterring fraudulent cybercriminal activity. ”
The motion still has to be brought to the floor by the government and even then it would require a majority of the House of Commons to vote for it in order to become law.
How scalper bots profit by buying and reselling Sony PS5 and …
These bots grab some of the limited stock of the PS5 and Xbox on eBay and Amazon and then resell them at huge markups, says PerimeterX.
Image: Sony
Scalper bots, or sneaker bots, have been chewing up supplies of the Sony PS5 and Xbox consoles amid a shortage of both units, leaving indvidual buyers in a lurch. In a report published Thursday, bot fighter PerimeterX described the damage that automated bots are causing to consumers and retailers alike. These programs have been dubbed sneaker bots because they typically scoop up pairs of hot, in-demand sneakers and then resell them at exorbitant Hiring Kit: Game Developer (TechRepublic Premium)
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Since the 2020 holiday season, the bots have been pulling the same stunt with in-demand gaming consoles, specifically the new PS5 and Xbox Series X. As this specific tactic surfaced around Christmas, these programs earned the moniker Grinch transition from sneakers to consoles is a sign that the human scalpers behind these bots are looking for bigger bucks, PerimeterX said in its report. For instance, a PS5 had been selling on eBay, Amazon, and other major retail sites for between $400 and $500. Since then, prices for the PS5 have skyrocketed to as high as $1, 800, which means that scalpers who were able to snag dozens of them stand to make a healthy profit.
These bots work by continually scanning the websites of retailers so they can swoop in right at the beginning of a sale ahead of individual buyers. They then serve the scalper all the relevant information, including the retailer’s website, price, available stock and SKU number. If directed, the programs will automatically pick up the item and bypass the usual shopping cart flow by heading to the checkout page. A bot delivers an update on a live Xbox sale.
Image: PerimeterX
Using different tricks, the bots are able to fool retail sites into thinking that they’re legitimate customers. By obtaining a valid cookie, they scrape the website’s inventory to impersonate a human being. The bots are even loaded with CAPTCHA-solving solutions that solve these kinds of Turing tests, which are designed to block such automated cause of their skill and intelligence, some of the bots can cost as much as $700 per license, according to PerimeterX. Some of the bot tools available include Hawk AIO, Zephyr AIO, Snatch and Thunder Solts. And they’re still active, according to Yossi Barkshtein, threat intelligence researcher at PerimeterX. The scalpers behind them will periodically test their tactics in anticipation of new inventory becoming available, which occurs a few times per month with certain items. A lot of gamers in search of PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles were none too happy with the activities of these bots, according to PerimeterX. The anger is especially intense given that the human scalpers behind them get away without any punishment. The problem was brought to the attention of politicians in the U. K., who suggested prohibiting the resale of PS5 and Xbox. But for now, such bots are allowed to conduct their sneaky and profitable campaigns with little legal pushback. “While bot-based purchases for reselling may not be fair or ethical, it is legal with one exception, ” Barkshtein said. “The resale of tickets purchased using bot technology was made illegal in 2016. Similar bills continue to appear on the legislative docket as well, such as the Stop Grinch Bots Act in 2019. Though legislation can be effective in combating bots and protecting online inventory, most online retailers choose to rely on bot mitigation software that proactively monitors and blocks sophisticated bots. “With its anti-bot technology, PerimeterX said it has worked with retailers who have been targeted by these sneaker bot attacks, prompting the company to track the latest developments and try to block these malicious activities. But PerimeterX added that it expects to see bots targeting more and more items in the future.
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Frequently Asked Questions about how to use bots to buy ps5
Is using a bot to buy PS5 illegal?
Members of Parliament have urged the government to take steps to make illegal the use of online bots to buy sought-after games consoles to sell on for profit.Feb 8, 2021
How do bots work for buying PS5?
These bots work by continually scanning the websites of retailers so they can swoop in right at the beginning of a sale ahead of individual buyers. They then serve the scalper all the relevant information, including the retailer’s website, price, available stock and SKU number.Apr 12, 2021
Are bots buying PS5?
The PS5 is one of the hottest gaming consoles on the market right now and it’s almost impossible to purchase one- thanks to bots. A PS5 bot is a software program designed to purchase as many PS5s as possible in a matter of seconds.Aug 11, 2021
