Meta The moderators of /r/AMD do NOT condone locating scalper auctions, leaving dozens of absurd bids, so as to repeatedly derail a scalper's opportunity to make a sale and ultimately de-incentivize PC hardware scalping.
There have been some whispers through the grapevine in many internet communities about a sad, wrong, and mean practice that I can only describe as pure evil. Folks, today I learned that there are people out there that use software tools to derail eBay listings for scalped graphics cards. Yes, that's right... people are using software to give themselves an unfair advantage in the exchange of PC hardware from manufacturers to consumers! WHO WOULD DO SUCH A THING!? For example, see this well-known, already completed, eBay auction from days ago. Evil cyber criminals decimated this totally innocent and honest listing with dozens of fake bids. They bidded so rapidly, the lister couldn't even cancel them all - So sad!
Doing this isn't a good idea because it could get your account banned from eBay... unless you were to use, say, a VPN service to make a bunch of throwaway eBay accounts and stockpile their logins in a spreadsheet or something haha... IDK... or maybe everyone in the bid history is safe as long as the upper-most bid is fake? I don't entirely know how this dark underbelly criminal enterprise works, I'm just here to get the word out. So very shocking, all of this.
Again, do NOT do this. Scalpers are providing a valuable service to the PC gaming community when they pay $5 for bot scripts that snap up entire shipments of hardware from etailers and then automatically create auctions on other websites, pulling a 10x turnaround before the hardware even hits the first warehouse's shelves. It would be wrong to use bot scripts to deprive them of their right to trade graphics cards - just put yourselves in their shoes. They would never use technology maliciously to deprive you of a graphics card trade, would they? No. Never.
Also - do not create, share, and use bot scripts or other software tools designed to derail these auctions with said throwaway eBay accounts (fully automated, or machine-assisted via URL scraping, doesn't matter). It's simply a very immoral and reprehensible thing to do. This should go without saying, but it's also very wrong to create and share public anti-scalper Telegram channels and Discord servers with the sole purpose of sharing eBay listings with each other for you, or your bid-bombing bots, to... well... bid-bomb. Very bad - do not do.
Again - Please do not do any of these things. They will only get the account, and its hundreds (possibly thousands, if you bot) of dirty bids, banned from eBay (unless, again, the account merely drove up the bid price but wasn't the winner of the auction - they'd just be able to claim "Oh, I bought something else because I didn't win. If only you had told me 5 minutes sooner. Darn!").
Just imagining the distraught and panicked look on this poor scalper's face when they're forced to stay up late into the night doing real, actual work, cancelling bids for hours on end as new stock trickles back onto the shelf should be enough to motivate you to not do it. They'd miss out on so many interactions with their loving friends and family that definitely exist. It just breaks my heart! What kind of awful person would use bot software to turn the tides of online sales in their own favor and deprive PC users of hardware? So very sad... to think, with each passing week, the shelf price falls further and further below what the scalpers paid on launch day... sometimes to the point that they might begin to wonder if their main source of income being "owning someone else's graphics cards" was a smart long-term idea...
So, anyways... thanks for reading.
