New anti-Grinch act wages war on PS5 bots and scalpers

Congress wants to use legislation to stop bots from buying up all the electronics and manipulating the market.

COVID-19 has significantly disrupted supply lines and demand has skyrocketed as a result. This on its own led to higher prices, but bots and scalpers have pushed things to a new level as once-leisure products like PlayStations, Xboxes, Nintendo Switches, and graphics cards have doubled and tripled in price. Want an RTX 3090? You could have one...for the price of a used car. Everyone's trying to buy into a market that's already been bought up by automated bots.

In the good spirit of Christmas, Congress wants to put an end to the price-gouging madness with the Stopping Grinch Bots Act.

Representative Paul Tonko (D-NY), Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) have introduced the bicameral bill, which will "crack down on cyber Grinches using "bot" technology to quickly buy up whole inventories of popular holiday toys and resell them to parents at higher prices."

The Stopping Grinch Bots Act was actually introduced years ago and would use the power of the previously-passed BOTS Act--the Better Online Ticket Sales Act that was established to prevent and discourage scalping--which includes penalties levied by the Federal Trade Commission and even prosecution in class-action lawsuits on an individual state level.