From PC World: Reseller bots are hitting online retail listings at almost ten times the rate of genuine traffic, according to one security researcher. I do a little digging into reseller listings on Amazon and Newegg.
When an in-demand product gets scarce, the vultures of consumerism descend. Resellers insert themselves between something people want and suppliers, sucking up every possible dollar to be made. So it went with GPUs and webcams and toilet paper in the pandemic, so it goes with RAM in 2026. For at least one retailer, over 90% of the web traffic for RAM listings came from “scalper” bots.
That’s according to Jérôme Segura, security researcher and VP of Threat Research at DataDome. In a LinkedIn post he claims that over a two-week period, DataDome blocked 91 percent of traffic, identifying it as “bad bots,” with only the remaining 9 percent coming from genuine shoppers or other sources. This is following a report from March (spotted by VideoCardz.com), wherein DataDome found that bots were hitting the same kind of listings at a six-to-one ratio over genuine buyers, detected via a complex series of variables and blocked where possible.
This sort of behavior “suggests automated price monitoring for reselling opportunities.” In English, that means people are using bots to find the lowest-priced RAM kits so they can buy them and relist them at higher prices. It’s nothing revolutionary, or even illegal — this is ye olde “buy low, sell high” in its purest form. But the web surveillance tools being used by unscrupulous resellers are allowing them to squeeze PC consumers at a time when they’re at their most vulnerable.
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