@_let_them_fly_ The Lego Hack of 2024 #earcamera #legominifig #legocmf #legominifigures #legogoat #_let_them_fly_ #lego #afol #hiydesign #minifigs ##legocollector #legos #legohack ♬ People Help the People - Birdy
404:
In ticket reseller lingo, Scott’s tour is a “bloodbath,” the result of overzealous brokers and noobs “overbuying” tickets based on a miscalculation of the likely value of his tickets on the secondary market. Many brokers now stand to lose a lot of money on Scott’s shows. At least part of this buying frenzy was fueled by a bet placed by PFS Buyers Club
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I spoke to people who are currently floating tens of thousands of dollars on their credit cards for Travis Scott tickets they have no idea what to do with. PFS has been telling angry members that it could go out of business because of how much money it stands to lose from the bet.
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“The fact they said you could buy an unlimited number of tickets for any tour dates, any city, and all of them are $25 commission, I thought, ‘Well, that sounds pretty good.’”
404:
“I am in the credit card churning community, and one of the things we do is take advantage of ‘manufactured spend’ opportunities,” which are opportunities to spending money on credit cards to earn points, without any risk, they said. “One of the methods of manufactured spend called ‘buyers groups’ and the basic setup is that you buy stuff the group requests (think iPhones, PS5s, laptops) on credit cards (and earn points for those purchases) and then dropship or reship to the group who (hopefully) pay you back and then resell the products.”
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The tipster, who I agreed to keep anonymous because they did not want to get kicked out of the group, then added that a buying group that specializes in buying rare coins from the U.S. Mint and that has “recently branched out into reselling tickets.” They then forwarded me three emails sent by a company called PFS Buyer Club, imploring their users to register for Olivia Rodrigo’s Ticketmaster presale, and to let their ticket buyers login to club members’ Ticketmaster accounts and use their credit cards if they won a code.
I believe one of the main reasons for this is because PS5 scalping has been and still is occurring on an industrial scale.
— Jodie De Haarte ~ J-Cat (@jodiede) February 10, 2023
Most of these PS5s are resold in China. 🇨🇳🚢
There is still a demand for Japanese PS5s in China because Chinese PS5s are region locked.
"South-East Asian" resellers gathered with a huge haul of PS5s from Yodobashi Camera.
— Jodie De Haarte ~ J-Cat (@jodiede) February 10, 2023
📸Pic: @Gifu_Hashima 27 Nov 2022 pic.twitter.com/MRDsvlZ0vK
While many studios did amazing work on the remaster, I'm let down Metroid Prime's Remaster does not include the full original game credits. I worked with so many amazing people on the game and everyone's name should be included in the remaster, not just a single card like this. pic.twitter.com/Yvojf9f9Mq
— Zoid Kirsch (@ZoidCTF) February 11, 2023
Zadeh Kicks’ founder ... called the Eugene Police Department asking for police protection. [He] was apparently afraid for the safety of his family after a number of furious customers showed up at the Zadeh Kicks warehouse in an industrial section of West Eugene demanding their money back.
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the FBI has launched a criminal investigation, trying to figure out what happened to the enormous sum of customers’ money that has gone missing.
Zadeh Kicks was established in 2013 as a sneaker resale company. Over the years, it became known for offering preorders for hyped sneakers far in advance of their official release date. The price points for the sneakers were often considerably lower than their expected market values, creating an enticing model for both resellers looking to stock up on product for lower-than-normal and average customers who wanted to avoid paying the high-end value.
When reports and rumors of new sneaker releases would leak, Zadeh Kicks would offer them for preorder almost instantaneously. This meant that there were sometimes cases where the shoes would never materialize as a retail release (e.g. Futura x Off-White x Nike Dunk Lows) or would be exclusively offered from one source (e.g. Fragment Design x Travis Scott x Air Jordan 1 Highs on SNKRS). In these cases, Zadeh Kicks would be unable to provide the sneakers and would instead offer buyers store credit or heavily taxed refunds, terms that were clearly stated on the website.
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One of the elements that made Zadeh Kicks so appealing to flippers and wearers alike was that despite their “low” ticket price, all signs pointed to the shoes being real.
“I’ve seen people get fully doxxed online for reselling, and I’ve seen people post pictures of ‘shelf clearers’ at the store with their names and everything”
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“People are so scared now that they make up stories about how they got a Squish — pretending they got it from a cousin or something — just to avoid the backlash.”
From a post about Rolex scalping and watches being status symbols for the investment class:
Visit any authorized dealer today and you will find almost nothing to buy. The display cases are literally empty. There are a few undesirable models sitting around – smooth bezel Datejusts and the like – but you aren’t finding any watch that one would have considered even the least bit desirable just two or three years ago.
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To discover the true price of a new Daytona, head over to Chrono24 – the most popular online watch market – and search “116500LN.” You’ll find more than 100 models to choose from, most of which are “new/unworn” and offered directly by jewelry stores. The price ranges from $32,500-$40,000, or roughly three times the official Rolex list price.
How did all of these new watches end up in the hands of non-authorized jewelry stores? Authorized dealers are forbidden from selling units at any price other than $13,150. Are they just handing out spectacular deals to their competition for nothing in return? Of course not. Either directly or indirectly, deals are being cut, money is changing hands, and watches are flowing from Rolex through authorized dealers and onto Chrono24 before any retail buyers can even see them.
It is almost farcical to walk into an authorized Rolex dealer today.
It's just a *tad* prettier than the original, which you can see here for comparison. pic.twitter.com/74L9guo6k1
— Dominic Tarason (@DominicTarason) July 1, 2021
— Ravin Boodram (@rvbdrm) July 1, 2021
#tbt my #Samus cosplay from Metroid Prime.
— Xephyr (@XephyrStudios) July 1, 2021
Taking a look at #MetroidDread, I'm feeling a bit inspired to do Samus's new armor. pic.twitter.com/ro5i7NTQ9W
To celebrate today's #MetroidDread announcement, here are the Metroid Artist Contest Winners from Nintendo Fun Club News (April/May 1988) pic.twitter.com/6ymErxuvfx
— Castle Zotz (@castle_zotz) June 15, 2021
Microsoft Flight Simulator's nightmarish depiction of Disneyland. pic.twitter.com/RRr2xcNs46
— Michael Curzi (@michaelcurzi) June 21, 2021
CNBC:
Nike said Monday that the vice president and general manager of its North America division...has left the retailer, effective immediately.
Her abrupt departure comes after she’s served more than 25 years with Nike.
Nike does not permit its employees to participate in sneaker reselling, and the practice of buying shoes at their retail price only to sell them at a higher price is still taboo to many collectors. A Nike spokesperson told Bloomberg that [she] had disclosed information about the business to her employer in 2018 and there was “no violation of company policy.”
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[Her] purview at Nike included its SNKRS app, a destination for coveted product where shoes regularly sell out immediately, only to be resold on secondary markets.
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[The credit card used by her son to make bot purchases] was registered in his mother’s name.
Bloomberg offers a long look at how the sneaker reselling business works:
The day these Yeezys were released, he’d awoken at 3 a.m., signed on to the messaging platform Discord, and rousted 15 members of his “cook group,” a term sneaker resellers use to describe their allies in arbitrage. When the shoes went on sale an hour later, [his] team swarmed the Yeezy Supply website using specialized computer programs such as Cybersole, Kodai, and GaneshBot, each prepped with [his] credit card information and capable of gaming a system meant to limit purchases to one pair per customer. By 6 a.m. the shoes were sold out, and [his] bots had rung up $132,000 on his American Express. His company, West Coast Streetwear, resold the shoes in almost as little time as it had taken to buy them, clearing $20,000 in profit. “Anything that’s releasing that I know I can make a guaranteed buck on, I’m gonna go full into,” [he] said. “That’s just my style.”
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[His] competitors have access to the same bot software and StockX-borne real-time market research as he does. What they don’t have, according to some of his subscribers, is consistent, sound analysis of what shoes to buy, how to get them, and, crucially, how long resellers might expect demand to persist. [He] declined to talk about his sources of information, but he did say he was lucky to have grown up in Portland, where both Nike and Adidas base their U.S. operations. “If you know the right people here, this is the city to sell shoes,” he said. The right people “can give you access to stuff that, like, a normal person would not have access to.”
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I’d learned, quite by accident [his mother had] worked at Nike for 25 years and had recently been made its vice president and general manager for North America. The press release announcing her promotion noted that she would be “instrumental in accelerating our Consumer Direct Offense”—the Nike initiative that had helped fuel the sneaker-resale boom.
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When I asked [him] about the connection later that year, he acknowledged that [she] was his mother and said that, while she’d inspired him as a businessperson, she was so high up at Nike as to be removed from what he does, and that he’d never received inside information such as discount codes from her. He insisted, though, that she not be mentioned in the article and cut off contact not long after our conversation.
NYT:
We had an outside agency, Berenter Greenhouse & Webster. Bill Berenter, he saw the postcard for what it could be, I believe. We went to them and said that we were playing with this little postcard, and they are getting buried in the mail. The agency did all these markups, and they came up with this big, blue thing.
It was big enough that when you put it into a pile of business letters and bills, you can see it behind all the other letters. They came in with a stack of mail, and had it tucked right behind, and sure enough, he was right.
We tried all the hot colors, red, yellow. They were just too harsh. We went with Pantone 2735c.
GROSSFELD I came to know it as blurple.
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Ten percent, we felt like it was nothing. Thirty percent we couldn’t afford.
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GROSSFELD For a long time, there were batches of Big Blues sold on eBay. I want to say that expired ones sold in batches of five for $5 to $7 and the nonexpired ones were more.
I remember laughing and being like, are you kidding me? But at that time, people didn’t know when the next one was coming and didn’t feel like they were getting them all the time.
LITTLE In Queens, at the Rego Park store, there was, let’s call them entrepreneurs. They would take them from apartment buildings, where they had “found” them. And they’d be outside the store selling them for $5 apiece.
WaPo:
His tools that morning included a bot he bought for $250. He ran it on a virtual server in Virginia, which offered a faster connection than he could muster from his laptop at home.
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[He] operates proxies to obscure his IP address, and even created slightly tweaked versions of his shipping address, to avoid having multiple orders look suspicious.
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Captchas, short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” are the quizzes that are supposed to detect bots. But [the scalper]’s tool kit has ways around those, too, including a subscription service that farms out Captchas to humans who fill them out in real time.
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[His] next four PS5 wins came thanks to a $500-a-month service from a company called Fulcrum that gives him instant updates on what’s in stock and hidden on parts of retailer sites visible only to search engines and bots.
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The United States is considering legislation based on the 2016 BOTS Act, which made it illegal to use the software to scalp tickets
I have an increasing amount of folks reaching out to ask 'what sneaker bot should I get'. The answer is not so simple because the good ones are very hard to get and can be very expensive (they have resale too -- retail is usually a couple hundred and many now have a SaaS model). pic.twitter.com/MMMu8kqNUi
— Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) December 1, 2020
If you want to get into the bot life then I'd suggest getting into a Discord group that will let you see the breadth of what's out there before you make the leap. Or you can take the plunge by buying a bot from @BotBroker_io -- every bot has its own Discord with a community.
— Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) December 1, 2020
There is something really interesting happening around these flipping/resell Discord groups.
— Blake Robbins (@blakeir) November 22, 2020
It almost feels like a new type of SMB. These resell groups started with sneakers, but it feels so much more broad now.
These streamers are at Disney World, visited first aid last night for cough, shortness of breath, and severe vomiting, and were back in Magic Kingdom today complaining of sore throats pic.twitter.com/1mighq1pUa— Jenny Nicholson (@JennyENicholson) July 12, 2020
I’M ABOUT TO THROW UP pic.twitter.com/rjwv9WsRyf— Dolly Genovese (@thedollyllama_) July 9, 2020
Disney are so ingrained with evil they think this is a welcoming image. pic.twitter.com/sb2rBEQGGC— Jonathan Sloman (!) (@SquidyUK) July 11, 2020
Disney reopening video as an A24 trailer pic.twitter.com/lOawwk2nJa— Christopher Hudspeth (@CEHudspeth) July 11, 2020
The seller with the $1,275 dumbbells was also selling a Coleman SaluSpa inflatable hot tub for $1,400, which is also, allegedly, collectible. Back in March, it was going for $359. Other sellers were offering “collectible” Cuisinart bread makers for $239 ($82.76 two months ago) and $279.99 “collectible” Nintendo Switch games that previously went for $79.99. Amazon removed the listings I asked about, but other examples are still abundant, including a “collectible” $450 barbell bar and a “collectible” USB cable for $259.99.
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The opacity of Amazon’s price rules, and the difficulty of coming back after getting suspended for violating them, is exacerbating shortages on the site, McCabe says, as sellers decide to sit out the pandemic rather than risk running afoul of the algorithm. “To avoid that whole nightmarish scenario, most people understand that it’s better just not to risk it in the first place, which means the quantities of the items offered for these kinds of products will be lower,” he says.
Why, yes:https://t.co/NoSTdQruQu— Elise Misao Hunchuck (@elisehunchuck) May 28, 2020
Cummings will never be taken seriously again pic.twitter.com/bvHhLcuP1x— Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) May 27, 2020
I thought this was a joke. But sadly not. Cummings' father in law— Peter Jukes (@peterjukes) May 28, 2020
"Sir Humphry Tyrrell Wakefield who owns Chillingham Castle in Northumberland is riding his horse Barack, named because the horse is half black and half white" pic.twitter.com/dT42mdYsRY
Coronavirus: Monkeys 'escape with COVID-19 samples' after attacking lab assistant https://t.co/neUMb0nuhy— SkyNews (@SkyNews) May 29, 2020
I would check inventory checkers — websites and apps that tell you if stores still have particular items in stock — every hour or so to see if the city I was approaching had any items that there’s a lot of demand for. If they did, my only focus would be to get that item.
Rural Walmarts seemed to have stock due to their small local population — most of the inventory I purchased over the trip was from Nebraska and Kansas (although most stores have a limit on how many you can purchase, usually two at a time). I’d be in and out of the stores in five to ten minutes. I wore a mask and obviously washed my hands. Throughout the trip, I went to maybe 10 Walmarts.
I’d list the items on eBay as soon as I got them, and all of my shipping supplies were bought from Walmart. Each night, I’d pack everything from my hotel room and then mail it out from the local post office in the morning and continue on my journey.
Amazon appears to be taking two different actions against sellers on its marketplace who are marking up prices. One action involves removing the so-called “Buy Box” for an item, meaning that Amazon does not display the normal “Add to Cart” and “Buy Now” buttons on the right side of the product page. In place of those buttons, Amazon displays a “See All Buying Options,” which requires customers to visit an extra page to view different prices for the product sold by various sellers.
This action often means that Amazon’s technology has determined that the price of the item is too high compared to prices elsewhere on the web or the manufacturer’s recommended retail price. It’s meant, in part, to signal to shoppers that the price might not be a good one, while still allowing the option to buy it anyway. Some of that is going on right now.
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Sometimes, however, enterprising sellers are bundling together several units of a product into custom packs that aren’t sold anywhere else. In those cases, Amazon’s price-monitoring tech has nothing to compare the current price to.
Hundreds of fans who purchased tickets from usually reliable third-party vendors, such as StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid Seats, [were turned away at the door].*Previously: "For the last 5 years Kidrobot has been purchasing classic out-of-stock toys from collectors, and reselling them in our stores"
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Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which organized the concert, blamed “bad actors” who knowingly sold invalid tickets.
“The presenters of the concert directed that these tickets be made available only to fans and that they be strictly nontransferable,” Ticketmaster said in a statement.
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“Last night’s concert tickets were $25 and geared toward the fan club,” the band said in an email via their representative.
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Third-party sellers were scrambling Friday to investigate how the ticket problems happened and return customers’ money — and they wanted to clear the air, saying the fault was not theirs. Several employees of the resale vendors said that neither the Black Keys, Ticketmaster nor Live Nation indicated tickets to the concert would be nontransferable.