Dec 20, 2021 7:00 AM

Hypebeasts With Bots Have Ruined Christmas

As resellers snap up the scarce supply of new consoles and other must-have items, politicians, shoppers, and retailers are fighting back.

A PS5 gaming controller on a black background and lit with red and green light

For the first few months following the November 2020 UK release of the Sony PlayStation 5 (PS5), Tom Thorley knew he stood little chance of nabbing the console. Chip shortages, supply chain disruptions, and a range of complicating factors, including the minor exacerbating issue of a prolonged global pandemic, meant there were too few PS5s to go around—and competition to get hold of one was fierce. But by early 2021, Thorley had hoped things would have calmed down.

“I was never desperate for it and didn’t feel a need to have it right now, so kept checking a couple of times a month for stock,” Thorley says. “Every time though: nothing, nada.” Spring turned to summer, and still Thorley was unable to get his hands on a console. He began to get frustrated: Even when carefully monitoring an account on Twitter designed to inform people when retailers restocked PS5s, and joining an associated Discord group, he’d find himself shut out of sites when he logged on seconds or minutes later to buy. “This happened several times over the months with several retailers,” he says. “Even if I was quick, there would be none left.” Thorley, an interaction designer from Manchester, England, knew about the increasing prominence of bots—automated systems, tasked by humans who operate them for profit to react quicker than people to complete a purchase before the average buyer can even get out their credit card. And he’d had enough. “I was damn right pissed off,” he says. “At first I wasn’t bothered so much as I figured I’d wait. But eventually it really started to become annoying as hell.”

As the festive season fast approaches, his frustrations will be far from alone. Automated bots have changed the face of online retail, and have been blamed for millions of parents being unable to get their kids their desired presents this Christmas. Already scarce items are being snapped up by resellers backed by tech, who can then get the premium stock out on the market at a higher price. Politicians in the United States are threatening to regulate, introducing a bill that would “stop Cyber Grinch greed from ruining kids’ holidays,” says Senator Richard Blumenthal, who coauthored the mooted bill. In the UK, Douglas Chapman, an MP for the Scottish National Party, is also pressing the government to do something to tackle bots in the run-up to Christmas.

Those behind the bots say it’s not their fault.

Curtis Taylor grew up in Hartlepool, England. “I don’t come from money,” he says. “I’m from a quite run-down kind of town.” The 26-year-old’s family could never pay for a console at resale prices. “I can say from experience, I really do feel for parents who are trying to get the kids the latest technology and just can’t. It must be heartbreaking at Christmas.”

Taylor runs Peachy Pings, a digital community of buyers who pay him £35 ($46) a month to gain access to a range of digital tools that give users information that allows them to purchase items that go on sale before anyone else. Peachy Pings’ Discord server, which includes large resellers who make it a business and individuals just looking to get their hands on must-have items, blasts out restock announcements up to five minutes before free Twitter accounts do. That momentary time advantage can make the difference between someone securing a scarce item and other buyers missing out. “It’s really sad,” says Taylor about the reality of some children missing out on their must-have items on Christmas morning. “But it’s also an issue that comes down to the suppliers. They’ll have the means to produce more, but at the moment they get free advertising [because of the scarcity]. That means more demand for their consoles.”

The Peachy Pings business owner does acknowledge that the global chip shortage that has decimated electronics production, and the ongoing global supply chain crisis, have played their part in reducing the availability of consoles. But Taylor also believes there’s an artificial lack of supply to inflate the perception of interest and excitement for the products. Financial report announcements from Sony and Nintendo indicate they’ve slashed planned production due to a shortage of components. “Two years ago, before the pandemic, we were mostly living in an era of abundance,” says Patrick Sullivan of Akamai, a cybersecurity and content delivery company that develops anti-bot technology for retail clients. “Almost anything you wanted, you could go online and have it show up at your door within 48 hours.” Some manufacturers of sneakers, designer handbags and sellers of concert tickets would deliberately drip-feed items onto the market to create hype, but that’s less the case for most items now. “Unfortunately, with the supply chain and pandemic and everything else going on, more items are falling into that scarcity,” says Sullivan.

The issue is compounded by the growing importance of botting. As coronavirus lockdowns hit the world, people began looking for other ways to make money—and turned to bots to get ahead in the resale race. “Because there are now so many active groups, we’re seeing them target other things,” says Thomas Platt, head of ecommerce at Netacea, a cybersecurity company. The basic principle remains the same: Individuals use bots to snag items, often in multiples, that are in demand. They then resell them on sites like StockX, Ebay, or elsewhere at a higher price, hoping to make a tidy profit. It’s no longer just games consoles: Netacea have seen rarer LEGO sets that would ordinarily sell for £40 ($53) on resale sites for double that. The company also saw a run on luxury advent calendars. “The Chanel calendar sold out in one minute, which isn’t physically feasible on an ecommerce site,” says Platt.

Those behind the infrastructure that enables what has been labelled “grinch botting” also claim some blame lies at the feet of those originally selling the items. “In my eyes, retailers don’t really care about who’s purchasing them, as long as it’s not illegal,” says Ryan Hooper, the 22-year-old founder of Rampage Proxies, which provides VPN-like proxy addresses designed to spoof where an automated buyer is located in order to get access to sale items quickly and evade any anti-bot mechanisms that are put in place by ecommerce sites. Hooper, an aerospace engineering graduate based in the south of England, set up his business in the spring of 2020. Rampage Proxies has “a few thousand customers” who have made an estimated 10,000 purchases using his proxies.

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, Hooper can’t say. “I can understand, because I do have brothers that want consoles and things, but if somebody wants a single console enough, there is enough stock for everybody to get one at retail price if you try hard enough.” He believes the real issue is the supply chain shortage. “The grinch bot legislation is targeting the end point and not necessarily the root cause of the problem,” Hooper says. “The blame is being shifted from manufacturing and supply chain problems to these people who are buying five or 10 of them in one go.” Because PS5s are not essential items, Hooper doesn’t see a problem with that. “If your child is going to throw such a fuss because you can’t get a PlayStation 5, then I think they’re a pretty entitled child, to be honest,” he says. Many in the bot community present their business success as a rags to riches story. Rightly or wrongly, they simply pass on wider responsibility to retailers.

The idea that major retailers need to do more is a sentiment that those who lose out to bots at the other end of the process can agree with: On Twitter, Thorley ended up venting his frustration at one of the major UK retailers, over their seemingly scant attempts to verify buyers were human. “Retailers really need to do more to ensure products go to genuine consumers,” he says. “All they care about is that it sells and they make money.” Whether they’re trying or not, the bots are succeeding. One bot provider claimed to have enabled 61,000 successful checkouts from a single retailer in November 2021, including buying 22,500 PS5s, 8,200 Xbox X’s, and 20,000 graphics processing units. The provider declined to speak to WIRED for this story. “It’s not a fair consumer experience,” says Platt, who supports legislating against bots. “If you’re up against a bot, you don’t have an equal opportunity.”

Akamai, Netacea, and other companies do work with retailers to try and head off bot activity. Akamai analyses more than 5 trillion hits a day on more than a billion devices, feeding it into a machine learning algorithm that tries to understand how humans behave on websites—and therefore is able to better spot bot-like behavior. “Some of the things we would look at would be all the way down to mouse movements and keypresses,” says Sullivan. “If it’s a mobile device, is the accelerometer, the gyroscope in the phone, moving corresponding to a keypress? That kind of rigor is going into asking whether what you see on the other side is human.” Managing retailers’ response to bots is a $200 million-plus business for Akamai, with 40 percent growth in the last quarter, Sullivan says. “The techniques bot operators use are common, and is expanding across retail.”

Resale bots promote a $4 billion industry, according to Jason Kent, hacker in residence at Cequence Security, which develops anti-bot techniques—and that secondary market is blowing up, in large part thanks to bots. Retail traffic to the websites of clients Cequence represents was higher in the first two weeks of December than the entirety of December 2020. One client Cequence works with has ecommerce software that is used by 2,000 large retailers around the world. During September, there were 240 million transactions using that retail experience platform throughout the month. In the first two weeks of December, it hit a billion transactions.

“Traffic going to websites has gone way up, and bots are coming along with them,” says Kent. And that traffic can be overwhelming. During a hype sale earlier this year for a sneaker sold by one of Cequence’s clients, the ecommerce website saw 6 million requests for 200 pairs of sneakers over 30 minutes. “That was summertime,” says Kent. “When you get even closer to Christmas, and everybody realizes you need to get that PS5, it’s going to be insane.”

For those eager to land their child’s favorite items in time for December 25, there may seem little alternative than to buy things at a higher-than-retail price on resale sites—netting the bot owners even more money to plough back into building more sophisticated systems. The only other feasible choice to almost guarantee getting what you want? If you can’t beat them, join them. “You’re seeing a general shift in consumers saying they need a bot to buy stuff,” says Platt—who warns against doing so, because he believes many bots operate on compromised networks. “I don't think it’ll ever become a world where everybody has to use a bot to buy something, because that just seems unrealistic,” says Hooper of Rampage Proxies. “But botting is definitely becoming more mainstream.”

Unusually, Taylor—who runs Peachy Pings—agrees with Platt that some legislation is necessary. “I’m all for people making their money, but I think the people who take like hundreds or thousands of pairs [of shoes] is excessive. I do think some form of regulation needs to be put in place, but I don’t think it’s the government’s place to do that.” Instead, he says, sites and companies should work harder to combat bots.

Still seeking that must-have item for your Christmas list? You could, of course, take your chances on the open market, eschew the bots and avoid the resale sites—just clicking quickly through the checkout process. Perhaps there’ll be a Christmas miracle. A year after the PS5 was first released in the UK, and nine months after first trying in earnest to nab one, Tom Thorley eventually managed to get his PS5 in November 2021. While working, he received an alert from Twitter that PS5s were in stock. He quickly tapped the link, and joined a 45-minute digital queue. He got through—“and lo and behold, I could press the buy button,” he says. “I had to ask colleagues on a call to wait while I did it so I didn’t miss out.”