Bot Wars: Enthusiasts Fight eBay Scalper Listings with False, Automated Bids

The moderators of Reddit’s r/AMD subreddit have had enough with cybercriminals disrupting poor, innocent scalper sales, and have posted a thorough PSA on how exactly to make sure you don't commit this heinous cybercrime yourself. It's complete with links to the tools you should definitely not use to cancel scalper eBay listings with very little risk or effort. Pinky swear.

Sarcasm aside, a post from late last week shows that enthusiast communities are now developing bots of their own to fight back against scalpers. And these aren’t stock notification bots, which arguably make things almost as difficult for the average person as scalpers do. No, these are bots that seek to delegitimize aftermarket CPU and GPU sales entirely by making absurdly high bids on gray market listings using burner eBay accounts.

Last Friday, the head moderator of Reddit's /r/AMD, which has 712,000 members, posted a sarcasm-laden announcement - more of a guide - with a list of VPN software and bot scripts, encouraging (or, depending on your reading, not encouraging) users to create false eBay accounts through a VPN, then use the provided scripts to make dozens of absurdly high bids on scalper listings for items like Big Navi graphics cards and Zen 3 CPUs.

The idea would be to force scalpers to spend time manually cancelling bids, or to get their listings taken down through bidding so much that scalpers can’t cancel enough bids in time before the system declares the auction over. Ultimately, it would populate eBay with so many false buyers on scalper listings that putting items up for resale on the site becomes useless.

Making a false bid, of course, breaks eBay’s rules and could get your account banned. But with burner accounts and a VPN, one person could, in theory, continually repeat this strategy for weeks on end with no repercussions.

We’ll have to wait to see if one Reddit post from an enthusiast forum can upend the entire gray market, but the tactic here is sound enough that it’s worked before. The r/AMD post opens with a link to an eBay auction that was derailed with dozens of bids ranging from $10,000 - $70,000. In this case, the false bids were almost all placed a day before the guide went live. The people placing these large bids clearly had no intention of paying them, and while three of the accounts behind the bids have already been banned, the other 3 are still active and more can be created on other listings without issue by following the guide.

We’re sure that when you pictured 2020 as a kid, these aren’t the kind of bot wars you were imagining would be happening now. But with the state of our world as it is, we guess even Skynet has to work remotely.