We can hear what the scalper thinks about buying everything from us and then selling out-of-stock products at a significantly higher price…

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, video card, even RAM: these are all quite often targeted by scalpers. Sky News caught up with Jack Bayliss, who runs a sort of aggregate service for other scalpers looking to make money. For £30 a month, they can sign up and be notified when distributors have new stock of a popular product. He makes $61,000 from this alone, and many applicants are said to be relatively young…

“To me, owning the PlayStation 5 or an Xbox [Series] isn’t a necessity. It’s a luxury, okay? If you can afford to spend £450, spending the extra £100 should be pretty marginal if you’ve got cash ready to splash on that. Yes, some families will have to pay another £100, but what you don’t think about is our members, they’ve got 30 consoles, they’re making £100 on each one. And then they’re making a good month’s salary in a couple of days. What they’re doing is they’re entrepreneurs, they’re going out, creating a side income, and they’re doing something that 90% of the population can’t be bothered to do,” Bayliss said.

The 24-year-old scalper says his service is comparable to the stock market, where after buying a popular stock, they sell it to make a profit. A production process is also just a form of overhead for new distributors. For him as a person, that’s pretty much in line with his figurative moral compass. And that does sound bloodcurdling, and that’s putting it mildly.

It’s not a service, it’s just an annoying middle-man, and it can be pointed out that it’s an extra step in the commercial process (and it’s no coincidence that Sony decided to launch PlayStation Direct in Western Europe: there, you can order a PlayStation 5 directly from the manufacturer, for example!) and adds no value whatsoever. It just stuffs the wallets because the deal is where these vultures make their money. There is no other way to define it.

Source: PCGamer