The Nvidia RTX 3080 eBay Debacle Exposed a Scalper Bot Civil War @ Gizmodo

By now most of you will have heard or "seen" what happens when scalpers do that they can to scam you out of something.  I went to PAX Prime a couple years ago, the show sold out in like 30min and yet there were 10+ scalpers selling day passes to the show and buying passes from folks who were leaving.

That isn't right but, it is the world we live in.

Well, when the NVIDIA RTX 3080 launched it wasn't the consumers who won but the botnet placing fake orders with the intent they would resell them on ebay where another set of bots would place fake bids to get people to pay way more than what the card was worth.  What more, these bots would shove the price up high enough that someone who thought they had lost would actually win the auction because the bot retracted their inflated bids.  Talk about bait and switch and a great way to ruin your ebay reputation.

Gizmodo set out to uncover the botnet world after reading a post on the NVIDIA forums from a user who created a counter bot just to mess with scalpers.

Now RTX 3080 GPUs are being listed on eBay with bids that exceed $10,000. But those ridiculously high bids might be the result of bots created by fed-up potential buyers. After I wrote about who in the hell would buy a RTX 3080 for $70,000, I quickly received dozens of messages from people pointing me to a post on the Nvidia forums where a user claimed that they wrote a bot to inflate scalper prices. The post on Nvidia’s forums has since been removed, but I was able to connect with the post’s author

Super crafty and reminds me of an article I wrote about "traffic pumping" or more specifically how to inflate web traffic for fun and profit.  It is a thing but rarely used these days.

Related Web URL: https://gizmodo.com/the-nvidia-rtx-3080-ebay-debac...