During the weeks of confinement with the coronavirus, console units are rare in the United States. This is how the organized group works.
Nintendo Switch units on the market are scarce in the United States in recent weeks due to the industrial shutdown caused by the coronavirus. Of the few that are in North American stores, the possibility of finding stock decreases since a group of speculators is monitoring different web portals through bots to buy them as soon as they are available again and sell them at a higher price.
Trading with Nintendo Switch: up to $ 750
From Motherboard, the VICE technology portal, they have traced the origin of the almost total lack of supply in portals such as eBay and Amazon, where in both stores the number of resellers (third-party buyers who sell new units, in this case) has grown suddenly; as well as the price of the console, which has gone from having a price around $ 300 – depending on the added taxes – to more than $ 700 if it is about special packs as coveted as the limited model of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. And yes, they sold them.
The name of the discovered bot is Bird Bot, an application with a similar function to the web browser extensions that warn of price drops or stock returns of monitored products. In this case, the bot not only identifies the return of units available in these well-known chains, but it can also automatically add the console to the cart, making it possible to purchase the product in a matter of seconds with a few clicks.
This situation therefore prevents buyers without these tools from accessing the Nintendo Switch in time and, consequently, that the resale is affected by severe speculation that has affected the price with an unbalanced percentage.
From MotherBoard they managed to enter the Discord group enabled by the leading speculator group and discovered that the number of monitored stores was very large, with practically all major supply chains with online stores in the United States affected: Best Buy, Walmart, GameStop …
The competition began to be even greater after the entry of other bots such as Phantom, which acted similarly at Best Buy —where they got to buy more than 500 Nintendo Switch in 24 hours—, Scottbot and Switft. All of them declined to comment to Motherboard upon inquiry. Faced with this scenario, the situation has also begun to be seen in local shops. Discord moderators are now asking that the main users of the action also make donations to different NGOs, but they are only proposals for now.
Nintendo will restore the stock of Nintendo Switch in the United States as normal in the coming weeks.
