Sony’s PS5 has made headlines not because of its performance or games but for its availability. People looking to get a console this holiday season have had a hard time in getting one due to the crazy demand vs the lower stocks.
In the meantime, a lot of scalpers on eBay have made good use of the platform and made huge profits selling these consoles at ridiculous prices. A data engineer Michael Driscoll has analyzed these scalping activities on the newer Xbox and PlayStation 5 consoles.
They have sold 29,255 units of Microsoft’s new consoles on eBay for about US$23.5 million, however, Sony’s new PlayStation 5 have been well received by gamers because of its wide fanbase. This means the worst affected with scams on eBay were the PS5s both digital and disc editions. So, as per Driscoll’s research, these scalpers sold around 7,322 units of the PS5 Digital Edition while managing to sell a whopping 25,642 units of the disc variants via eBay until the start of December.
As we see in the price graphs, the disc version was sold at 200% of the original MSRP (US$499) while the Digital Edition hitting over 350% of its US$399 price tag. The prices have even crossed the $1000 mark where the Digital Edition was sold at US$1,025 and the regular PS5 for as much as US$1,101.
As per the total calculation, the total sales accounts for $34.75 million, where the scalpers and eBay making over US$19 million in profit. This is just an analysis of only one platform and actually if all of these malpractices can be taken into account and the total scam could be up to 10x times as reported in the analysis. Have you faced such issues as well? Let us know in the comments down below…
via Notebookcheck
