Pokémon fans almost missed the upcoming TCG set Phantasmal Flames. Scalpers found an early way into the set's pre-order pages, which were supposed to go live later this Wednesday. They used bots to buy over 42,000 products, causing the collection to sell out before real players could even see them listed in the Pokémon Center online store.
PokeTCGAlerts on X shared a Discord screenshot of an alleged scalper server. At least two users were bragging about their bot buying all that Pokémon product. "This is OUR holiday season, let the criers cry and whiners whine, they can go tell their moms what happened today and break their monitors while we reap the profits," one of the scalpers wrote after bragging about causing Phantasmal Flames to go out of stock.
A few minutes later, however, the same scalpers shared a screenshot that the Pokémon Center had canceled their order. That likely means The Pokémon Company quickly saw that these users not only cheated the system to buy products early, but also spammed the servers to order absurd numbers of items that legit buyers would never order.
It's unclear how many orders The Pokémon Center canceled, but they were at least partly identified and shut down. In the replies to the tweet, users shared other screenshots of alleged scalpers also having their orders canceled.
Pokémon TCG collectors in the reply were ecstatic with the quick response from The Pokémon Company. "Bots lost, time to celebrate," a fan wrote. "I’m so happy to see a company do the right thing," another added. "I wonder if this was a honeypot, they are just going to scrape all the info of the accounts that were botting and ban them from the upcoming pre-order. If that is the case... wow, chessmove," a hopeful player wrote.
Pokémon fans have been in a war with scalpers since 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. That was when most people started looking for extra hobbies to pass the time during lockdown, and collecting Pokémon cards became one of them. Pokémon collecting stayed popular even after the pandemic ended, so today you can find videos of scalpers in physical stores packing their shopping carts with blisters and Elite Trainer Boxes whenever a new set is out. They don't care about the hobby; they just want to clear stocks by buying products at the suggested retail price and selling them for more.
Scalpers' investment in flipping these products is big because profit margins are also big. In the case of Phantasmal Flames, if all 42,000 products that scalpers attempted to snatch were Elite Trainer Boxes at $59.99, these people would have collectively spent $2.5 million in products. If they managed to make these products sell out on The Pokémon Center, they could easily resell these ETBs for $100 or more, nearly making the same $2.5 million in profit alone.
It's sad to think that capitalism at its finest is people creating robots to trick online stores so they can buy ink-covered paperboard faster than others. This time, though, real Pokémon fans might have a shot at not buying overpriced items—at least until another group of scalpers wins.
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The post The Pokémon Company just saved fans from a massive 42,000-item scalping TCG nightmare appeared first on Destructoid.
