In the United Kingdom, the scalpers who acquire huge amounts of the new consoles to resell them for multiple times the original price have found a new method to screw innocent people out of their consoles which they would have bought for themselves.

The scalpers now attacked Argos, another retailer in the United Kingdom, but not in the usual format. Until now, the scenario was something like the following: a retailer gets new stock of the PlayStation 5 (or the Xbox Series X) > the scalpers, with the help of bots, get in front of the queue > they acquire all the consoles > unfortunate people are out of luck. This time, they got PlayStation 5s before they were publicly available!

IGN reports that Argos’ new stock had technical issues, causing its site and its app to be buggy. Thus, a lower stock became public than what Argos originally received. IGN heard from multiple sources that a few people got the consoles a DAY before they were in the stock properly. Express Notify, a scalping brigade, found a loophole in the system. This is a paid Discord server where the users can gain links to buy the new Sony console before they are available on the website normally. The team is openly taking credit for this, flexing their results in the process.

While Argos did notice the issue, they still couldn’t stop every console bought this way to be held back from the scalpers, who will thus have another payday. They couldn’t do much, though, because this is a situation we haven’t seen before. (The last time we discussed a UK retailer, GAME, they made safety steps, but they did not get „preemptively attacked.”)

This will never end unless consoles will be sold in large amounts so that everyone can easily acquire one.

Source: PSU