More than two months after launch, it’s still almost impossible to find a PS5 in stock anywhere. Stock scarcity means that scalpers are still at it, scooping up the console that’s in high demand and low supply before legitimate consumers can get their hands on it. Another scalper group claims it recently locked in another 2,000 PS5s, and says that it “keeps getting easier” to secure them.
A UK scalper group known as Carnage made claims on that it had logged over 2,000 successful checkouts on today’s PS5 restock at GAME. They closed out the tweet saying “Just keeps getting easier every time,” followed by the devil emoji. The Carnage Twitter account is now private following what was surely an angry mob of PlayStation fans who have yet to get a PS5 for themselves. Fortunately, The Gamer’s Cian Maher managed to snag a screenshot of the tweet before the account was locked down.
Tweets like this one that tout the successes of the scalper group are essentially advertising for the business. Scalper groups like Carnage are run through memberships, where members pay a fee to have access to their tools and bots to secure orders for rare items, allowing them to then resell the items at a markup. The people who run the group then make their profits off of the membership fees, while promising members the ability to make money through buying and reselling.
Carnage also doesn’t hide the fact that it uses bots to secure orders. Its Twitter account name is even @CarnageBot. On the other hand, notorious scalper group CrepChiefNotify, who gained notoriety during the PS5 launch period, claimed that none of its sales were done using bots. While Carnage is making new claims thanks to this recent GAME restock, CrepChiefNotify hasn’t posted anything new to its social channels in nearly two months.
One member of CrepChiefNotify who paid the membership fees reported that the claims of success by that group were highly exaggerated in order to get people to sign up for its services. The group organizers make money on the membership fees whether its members secure the consoles or not, so inflating numbers of success gets them more money based on raising subscriber numbers. It’s unknown if Carnage’s claims from today are exaggerated for the same effect.
Exaggerated or not, scalpers continue to be an enormous problem for the new consoles and fans who just want to play the latest system. High demand means that Sony is having trouble keeping up with inventory, with new restocks selling out almost instantly whenever they go live. Various retailers and even politicians have sought to fix the issue in the future, attempting to find solutions to people making a profit simply off of keeping in-demand items in high demand. At this point it’s unknown when Sony will catch up to the demand enough that people can easily find PS5 stock, though some have reported a marginally easier time finding the console than it was at launch.
[Via: The Gamer]
