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Bots are being used to buy Switch units when they're restocked

Bots are being used by resellers to buy Switch units once restocked and resell them later at exorbitant prices.

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Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the stock of the Nintendo Switch has been affected for the past few months, making it difficult to acquire the console at regular store locations. This is happening in the worst time frame because the launch of Animal Crossing: New Horizons caused a spike on demand.

In addition to this problem, Motherboard has revealed that there is a reselling community using bots to automatically buy all the Nintendo Switch restocked units from different stores, to be able to sell them later for much more money.

The main tools used to achieve this are Bird Bot, Scottbot, Swift or Phantom. These bots even have Discord communities with more than a thousand users, where they dedicate themselves to speculating with the consoles. Prices of $500 for a Nintendo Switch have been reported on eBay, or even $750 for the Animal Crossing edition.

Among the stores affected by this event are Walmart, Best Buy or GameStop, all in America. The creator of Bird Bot, one of the software that this community uses, notes "I created it as a joke at first, but I quickly realized how powerful it could be." The sale sites are trying, by all means, to prevent this from happening, but it seems that the bots are increasingly designed with more capacity to avoid all kinds of controls.

Nobody knows what will happen to these practices that harm buyers, especially in a situation as delicate as the one we find ourselves in. On the other hand, the Japanese Nikkei newspaper reports this week that Nintendo has approved a plan to increase production by 10%, once the supply problems have been solved.

Bots are being used to buy Switch units when they're restocked


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