A 16-year-old scalper has sold $1.7 million worth of consoles and Pokemon cards, netting more than $100,000 in profit.
Odds are people hoping to land a new-gen console at launch didn't think they would still be waiting for one eight months later. Well, that's the reality, and for a lot of those people, there's no end in sight. While PS5s and Xbox Series X|S consoles are becoming easier to come by, chip shortages and scalpers are still making the process of hunting one down a chore.
You might have a clear image in your head when you think of what the typical console scalper looks like. It probably isn't a 16-year-old boy. They are out there though, as was revealed by a profile of young scalper Max Hayden in the Wall Street Journal. Hayden has been buying and selling PS5s, Xboxs, Pokemon cards, and other hard-to-get items like limited-edition sneakers.
RELATED: 10 PlayStation 5 Scalper Memes That Have Us Laughing (& Crying)
Hayden has enjoyed so much success since getting into the scalping game that his resold items have amassed $1.7 million. There's a hefty cost involved in getting your hands on all of these things before everyone else, of course. Hayden has still managed to make a $110,000 profit from reselling though. Not a bad turnover for less than a year's work.
While chip shortages are the main reasons consoles remain hard to get, scalpers have undoubtedly played a big part. As recently as April, scalpers in the UK claimed to be making £2000 per month. One site claims to have sold 130,000 PS5s between launch and May. While that might not seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things, it means that one company bought almost 2% of all PS5s sold by that point in time.
Both console creators and big retailers have been doing everything they can to prevent scalpers from getting their hands on most of their stock. There's also the ongoing effort to simply make more consoles and make them readily available as soon as possible. At this point, that probably won't happen until the end of the year, or perhaps not until the start of 2022.
NEXT: Pokemon Go Needs More Region-Locked Pokemon Like Corsola