The Quest to Prevent Scalpers and the Rise of the Freebie Bots

There is a word for people who buy a child’s game when it first comes out and then immediately try to sell it online for a huge profit: assholes.

Ok, technically the more common and polite term would be scalpers. It’s a common problem, though. Particularly when it comes to the still popular game of Pokémon where new card packs can be bought and sold online with ease. Recently, to try and curb this black market game, Pokémon Center Singapore has confirmed they will be removing the plastic wrapping from the cards at the point of sale in all cases, effectively devaluing the product in case someone was trying to sell it later.

While this may work in this one case, it’s just one part of a more interesting retail shift here being driven by AI and so-called “freebie bots” which are different from the bots used for scalping because they are not using AI to get in line first to buy a product or ticket and then flip it for an exorbitant profit. Instead, these freebie bots scour the web for pricing mistakes or big discounts which online resellers use to get products for very low rates and then they mark them up to near retail prices and pocket the profits.

Of course, there are tools to help retailers find and prevent such bots too. This is the retail AI game and it’s being waged beneath our clicks by bots seeking out deals and trying to buy goods, and technology purposely built to foil their efforts. As we read more about an agentic AI future in retail, there is a lot of attention on how it will shift product discovery and the relative importance of brand. Potentially even more important is how it could shift the financial side of purchasing, driving people to buy things they don’t need simply because they are alerted and see that something is on a huge discount.

When this becomes more commonplace, scalpers will likely move a lot lower on the list of retailers’ biggest concerns.