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Resellers Used Bots to Dominate the RTX 3080 Launch

Nvidia’s hotly anticipated RTX 3080 video card when on sale this week, and most of the people who wanted to buy one were unable to do so. You can thank bots like the one from Bounce Alerts that help resellers vacuum up stock for big product launches. This happens all the time, but it’s all the more frustrating when a product is in short supply, as it the case with the RTX 3080. 

Those who tried to purchase Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards found the Nvidia site to be unreliable. Even when they did manage to get a GPU in their carts, they would be unable to complete the transaction. As PC gamers started to simmer over the apparently botched launch, the resellers were gloating on Twitter. 

The screenshot below shows one reseller who managed to buy 42 video cards with Bounce Alerts tools, and they’re not the only one — numerous Tweets mentioning Bounce Alerts claimed a dozen or more verified orders for the $699 video card. Bounce Alerts tells our friends at PCMag the company uses “an automated script to run basically from the product page to payment information and then to checkout.” So, while you were tediously reloading the Nvidia store and trying to click buttons, a robot was doing it much, much faster. 

The scalpers are paying Bounce Alerts $75 per month for access to its suite of tools, but the subscription pays for itself and then some. There are already listings for the 3080 on eBay for $1,200-2,000, a significant markup on the MSRP. Not only is the card in demand, but the supply has been artificially constrained by people buying 42 cards at once. Bounce Alerts says its members can rake in $25,000 in a single day by snapping up hard-to-find products. 

Nvidia claims it has a policy of limiting purchases per customer, but it would appear Bounce Alerts found a workaround. There’s no reason Nvidia should be sending 42 order confirmations to one email — that’s pretty clear evidence something is up. Nvidia says it will go through and manually confirm orders, which we can only hope will cause these resellers to lose their ill-gotten merchandise. It hasn’t been specific about what, if anything, it will do to prevent more bot orders in the future. In the meantime, don’t buy overpriced video cards from resellers. The restocks will come, and you don’t want to reward this kind of operation.

Resellers Used Bots to Dominate the RTX 3080 Launch - ExtremeTech 

9 Replies

You should eBay etc, what a mess

0 Likes

Hopefully the industry learns from this and limits it to 1 per customer at launches in the future and can incorporate something like a Captcha that a bot can't answer to complete the sales. It seems this could be a very easy thing to fix moving forward, if the retailers choose to do so. 

Same thing happened with toilet paper

Based on the most recent news those cards are now outdated, as the 20gb cards are on their way. LOL

pokester wrote:

Based on the most recent news those cards are now outdated, as the 20gb cards are on their way. LOL

I have seen no indication from reliable sources of anything like that. Next up is the RTX 3090 and that card is very expensive.

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It's a joke. Notice LOL on the end?

pokester wrote:

It's a joke. Notice LOL on the end?

We should all get on eBay and report every RTX 3080 for sale at above $699 which is the price NVIDIA sells them for.

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tspag12
Adept I

It all about time and money. They can prevent this, but as long as they sell all their cards in 2 minutes, the sales department did an outstanding job. What they are forgetting is their actual pissed off customer base. I always purchased Nvidia and this was their chance to pick up on pissed off Nvidia customers but failed miserably. It’s simple, products that are susceptible to a bot attack make a change. Only Micro Center did something, no on line sales. Require all online sales to go through your AMD account. Now if there are any accounts with duplicate email, phone numbers or addresses do not allow the account.  When in checkout require a text message verification, buyer must text back a 4 digit code for the purchase. Also make it very difficult to transfer the warranty on products being resold in the first 30 days.  

And yes only 1 card per customer until enough cards are sold where bots are no longer an issue. Resellers with a verified account through commercial sales department only