A cybersecurity company says that iPhone scalpers seeking to profit from early demand for iPhone 15 models used bots to make millions of dollars’ worth of purchases from the Apple website as soon as orders went live.
The activity is lucrative for scalpers – who are able to resell the devices for hundreds of dollars over the retail price to those who are otherwise facing long delays to order through Apple – but in turn increase the waiting time for legitimate customers …
iPhone scalpers
Scalping is the term given to the process of buying products that are in high demand, for the sole purpose of immediately reselling them for significantly more than the retail price.
iPhone scalpers have long been a problem on iPhone launch days, as far back as the iPhone 4.
Apple had to close its Beijing Apple store yesterday because grey market buyers were sucking all the store’s supply. Customers were seen leaving the store with 20-30 iPhones all boxed-up, which they were then seen attempting to sell to passers-by.
The iPhone maker fought back, imposing limits on in-store and online purchases. But scalpers simply hired scores of people to stand in line to buy the phones from retail stores, and use bots to make online purchases.
Scalpers used bots to buy iPhone 15 models
Cybersecurity company Kasada says that shopping bots – also known as All-In-One or AIO bots – were repurposed from buying high-demand sneakers to placing iPhone 15 orders.
Kasada has been witnessing successful botting activity to abuse the Apple iPhone Pro Max pre-ordering process. More often than not, the activity is within the same communities and all-in-one (AIO) services that make their money scalping hype sneakers and electronics consoles […]
[One example] of AIO bots that quickly shifted their bot’s capabilities to exploit Apple’s pre-ordering event [claims] to have checked out nearly 2,500 iPhone 15 devices in a single day. At an estimated profit of $300 each, that’s an easy $750,000 profit for those scalpers leveraging this bot.
[Another] claims 3,000 successful checkouts, setting expectations of shipment within the first week of its launch date. These scalpers can expect to make nearly $1,000,000 from this sale.
AIO bots are so-called because they handle the entire purchase process, from spotting when new stock is available to placing it in the cart and checking out. Such batch transactions can be completed in anywhere from 10 seconds to as little as 0.2 seconds.
It should be noted that Kansada’s business is blocking these bots, so the company has an interest in highlighting the scale of the issue, and its report relies on claims from bot-makers and their users. However, there’s no doubt that the problem exists, and at considerable scale. A Piper Sandler study concluded that such bots contribute to a sneaker resale market worth billions of dollars.
As with retail store purchases by scalpers, Apple and other companies fight back with tools designed to detect bot usage, but there’s a constant war of escalation – as bot makers modify their tools to bypass detection, and retailers update their systems to detect these new versions.
Photo: Tyler Mohrman/Unsplash
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