Ways to counter hardware scalping?

[Autoism]

Figured we'd  have a chat about it here because while I had zero interest in buying anything right now, the news about hardware scalping on the rise again with nVidia's exceeding hype about the RTX 3080 causes grave concern for me as a consumer into the future. So let's share some ideas and see if we can collectively find an ideal solution to fight this so more hardware makes the hands of legitimate users.

 

I'll start with my idea:

 

Photographic identification of purchasers

This one's inspired by websites that let you buy and sell anything between game codes and legal drugs, but also applied (at least for me) when I was using PayPal. Since I've shared my state ID / citizenship license multiple times, I don't see any reason why there's further concern for privacy when I've yielded it so many times prior. This would basically limit the purchasing of cards to card-carrying citizens of their nation or state, or with a valid driver's license, but most people who have the money to drop on a gaming computer and the Internet to handle livestreaming would have this anyway, and could limit one per-user, per-month only with valid photo ID.

[imcaspar]

3 minutes ago, Autoism said:

Photographic identification of purchasers

This won't ever work for a global company like Nvidia, as those solutions your are referring to only operate on a National Scale. 

Every country has different IDs and not enough people have passports, while privacy laws in many countries would also make data collection in this way difficult if not impossible.

Overall, the cost would be immensely higher than the gained benefit and Nvidia, in the first place, wants to make more and not less money.

[Senzelian]

"Don't buy from scalpers and wait" is my personal solution.

[Applefreak]

There is a much easier solution than that. Just make sure you cannot pay with a credit card. If the buyer must wire the money first, the transfer will be documented. You could have multiple accounts but only one name, the bank should handle those things on their own. 

[AndreiArgeanu]

ID's can be easily counterfeited when it's only a photo of it you have to send. All you need is a bunch of stock photo's of people, an ID template, and you're on your way to scalp gpus.

 

I think the best idea is to have to physically show up to a store, with ID and pre order from there. That's the most effective generally speaking. And currently I've seen Linus mention that someone made a bot that bids on these rtx 3080 ebay listings with high amounts of money and then never pay the amount.

[Adubs62]

8 minutes ago, Applefreak said:

There is a much easier solution than that. Just make sure you cannot pay with a credit card. If the buyer must wire the money first, the transfer will be documented. You could have multiple accounts but only one name, the bank should handle those things on their own. 

No way in heck that would work. Wire transfers have no fraud protection, and are prone to user error. Credit cards are far more secure and have much stronger fraud protection for the purchaser. 

 

 

17 minutes ago, Autoism said:

Photographic identification of purchasers

This one's inspired by websites that let you buy and sell anything between game codes and legal drugs, but also applied (at least for me) when I was using PayPal. Since I've shared my state ID / citizenship license multiple times, I don't see any reason why there's further concern for privacy when I've yielded it so many times prior. This would basically limit the purchasing of cards to card-carrying citizens of their nation or state, or with a valid driver's license, but most people who have the money to drop on a gaming computer and the Internet to handle livestreaming would have this anyway, and could limit one per-user, per-month only with valid photo ID.

Others have pointed out some issues, but the biggest issue I see with this is liability for holding all that information. If you have an ID with Photo, name, date of birth, ID number etc. that's a big risk if it gets stolen. And given how often data breaches occur that is not information I would want to give to every retailer. Plus, they could easily be faked if they aren't verified with government agencies. 

[Applefreak]

@Adubs62 You could buy those cards with prepaid credit cards btw. no verification necessary.

My point was to prevent them from buying graphics cards in the first place. If you needed to go to a local bank to create an account, that would mean paperwork, which is traceable and if a certain amount of money changes hands, the account will be flagged unless it is a business account. Also I believe a lot of buyers don't have the money to buy those cards, that's where credit cards come in handy. By the time they have to repay the bank, they made a hefty chunk of money. The bots need a credit card for the fast checkout process. If you needed to wire the money to a reseller like newegg and they don't receive the money within a certain time, the order will be put on hold and eventually canceled. At which point the card goes back into the inventory.

 

The question is how far are resellers willing to go, in the end they are making a lot of profit that way. 

 

If you wanted to play dirty on those guys reselling cards, you would need to make sure that the cards will not have any warranty on them or have them pay taxes and for a business license because they are making a profit. 

[Adubs62]

Quote

If you needed to go to a local bank to create an account, that would mean paperwork, which is traceable and if a certain amount of money changes hands, the account will be flagged unless it is a business account

Who is flagging this account? There is nothing illegal about buying a product and reselling it. I can go and open 100 checking accounts if I want. I can do it all online. Yeah there is some paperwork involved but the accounts won't get flagged or closed or denied for a wire transfer.

 

Quote

 Also I believe a lot of buyers don't have the money to buy those cards, that's where credit cards come in handy.

 But you just said people are using prepaid cards which would have to have the money loaded onto them. Additionally there is nothing wrong with someone buying these with a true credit card. In many cases it could make it easier to block duplicate purchases that have the same billing & shipping information since legitimate credit cards have to be linked to your place of residence (though P.O. boxes could potentially get around this but they require additional infrastructure costs for the scalpers) 

>If you needed to wire the money to a reseller like newegg and they don't receive the money within a certain time, the order will be put on hold and eventually canceled.

I've done wire transfers they're just as quick. Really the only thing this would do is possibly change the way scalpers have to move their money around prior to a big launch like this, and it would come at the expense of everyone else's security 

[SolarNova]

Write a 'bot' that 'buys' the item and then doesnt pay

 

Keeps em in limbo until normal retailer stock meets demand thus nullifying the need for 'dim' people to buy of the scalpers. Resulting in the scalpers unable t offload the items at a profit.

[Morrie Sells Wigs]

If people weren't willing to pay inflated prices you wouldn't need extra layers of security to weed out bots.

 

As there will always be people who can afford to throw money at something to get it first, it will always give scalpers a reason to stock up on units and sell them at a huge mark up.

 

It's really supply and demand.

 

As Nvidia can't, or won't, control the supply in ways that make it impossible for scalpers - the demand will ensure it continues. 

 

Fix the supply and you end the market for scalpers to sell at a huge price.

 

But they won't or can't...and the cycle continues...

[Delicieuxz]

I think it'd pretty easy to solve the issue of bots and probably the large majority of purchasers by scalpers:

 

1. Implement a competent captcha to add cards to an online shopping cart. If necessary, resort to a code that's sent to the customers' email that needs to be entered on the store site, or ask a 'what is the 3rd word in the 2nd sentence of the following paragraph' or 'how many wings does a bird have' type of question. Or email customers an anagram or a word spelled backwards, in the middle of a sentence, and ask them to spell it properly on the store website.

 

2. Send an email link that's required to continue to the billing information stage of the checkout process. Include a couple of other links in that email, and randomize the ordering and titling of them to confound any automated processes.

 

3. Put a weekly or monthly limit on the number of cards that can be ordered, and check an order's information against shipping, billing, and payment information to catch redundancies and refuse orders with them. The system automatically checks that more than 1 or 2 cards aren't being sent to the same address, or using the same billing address, or being paid for with the same payment information - and any attempts to do so are automatically denied.

 

 

If companies aren't doing something like this, then it's probably because they don't actually want to stop the bots, the scalping, and the inflation of prices on the cards.

[dilpickle]

Like security or cheating it's going to be a constant cat and mouse game.

[dfsgsfa]

so iphone scaplers are fine?

gpu scaplers at mining crises are fine?

On 9/19/2020 at 10:29 PM, Autoism said:

the news about hardware scalping on the rise again with nVidia's exceeding hype about the RTX 3080 causes grave concern for me as a consumer into the future.

 

[PeachGr]

Nvidia was wrong to announce before they have a good supply, they knew they will have many requests BUT that's a small mistake. Customers can wait a month or two, it's not the end of the world. 

Also there is no problem with bots, it's not a limited edition sale, they will come again is a matter of weeks.

The problem are the customers as always.

And the customers that sold few days before presentation in hope to upgrade in a few days got what they deserved XD

[Arika]

GN put it best. GPUs are not food or water, calm down. 

 

Who cares if you can't get it day 1. Have some patience 

[Senzelian]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

GPUs are not food or water

Oh come on, I can't be the only one that sucks the fluid out of the vapor chamber! 

[Heliian]

Scalping has just gone crazy this year with everyone trying to make a quick buck for doing nothing.

 

The only solution is just for end users to wait for supply and refuse to pay over the retail price.  

 

It's a scummy practice carried out by scummy people.   It's going to be tough competition between them though as even in my small city there are already multiple ads up with overpriced rtx cards, xboxxs and now the rx6800 has been posted by some loser looking for an idiot buyer and he doesn't even have the card yet.

 

I'm not even in the market for any new hardware and I think what these people are doing is just deplorable.

 

 

 

 

[TetraSky]

Was able to see a 3070 in stock today on a local computer store's website.

I didn't buy it, because their margin($50 over what Newegg charge) is way higher than what I'm willing to pay and really, I'm waiting for the 3060, but still, nice to finally see one in the wild for once (online).

 

https://microbytes.com/computer-hardware/video-cards/asus-pcie-geforce-rtx-3070-tuf-gaming-oc-8gb-gddr6.html

 

Still appears in stock.

 

They also have a few 3090 in stock, but there's no way I'd ever pay $2500 for a graphic card...

https://microbytes.com/catalogsearch/result/?cat=0&q=RTX+3090
(they ship to the US and Canada, I believe)

[NineEyeRon]

The only way is to remove the buyers, scalpers wont exist without someone to sell to.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

3 minutes ago, Heliian said:

The only solution is just for end users to wait for supply and refuse to pay over the retail price.  

Shows how much control people have for products that are not what would be considered "essential".

[ToboRobot]

The inability to backorder, and have orders filled on order time creates the feeling of "scarcity".

Just let me order at MSRP and wait in a queue please.

[WereCatf]

3 hours ago, NineEyeRon said:

The only way is to remove the buyers, scalpers wont exist without someone to sell to.

Executing scalpers publicly would probably also work reasonably well.

[Letgomyleghoe]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

Executing scalpers publicly would probably also work reasonably well.

if someone gets mad about the ethics of it we can resort to tar and feather

[WereCatf]

11 minutes ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

if someone gets mad about the ethics of it we can resort to tar and feather

Eh, I'd reserve tar and feathers for the people buying from scalpers!

[Parideboy]

21 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

The inability to backorder, and have orders filled on order time creates the feeling of "scarcity".

Just let me order at MSRP and wait in a queue please.

Exactly. When it's ready it's ready, I don't care. At least I'm sure I've paid the right price and I don't have to search multiple retailers weekly (if not daily) hoping to find some stock.