Wherever there's a scheme ....
.... there's scum .... I mean a schemer!
Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz
Web scraping bots are increasing the pressure on the tech supply chain by scouring sites for DRAM, so their minders can snap up increasingly scarce inventory and resell it for a quick profit. DataDome, an online security biz, reports that its Galileo threat team spotted a large-scale data gathering operation that has submitted …
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Tuesday 3rd March 2026 15:43 GMT teknopaul
Re: Wherever there's a scheme ....
Im not sure using a computer to find stuff for sale is really a "scam".
Its not like buying stuff online is illegal, and hunting for stuff that is for sale on a website with an ai powered agent is doable eoth simple chatgpt prompts nowadays.
If it a scam is someone is going to have to tell the hedgies.
In reality such systems are useful to the economy: they force sellers to keep competitive pricings. And ensure common prices across different matkets.
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Monday 2nd March 2026 16:55 GMT PCScreenOnly
OK they are bastards, but
"Fraudsters will combine various tooling and commodities to perform fraud at scale, but it's not always obvious what they are using, or for which purpose," said Jérôme Segura, VP of threat research at DataDome, in an email to The Register.
I do not see how they are fraudsters. Bastards - yes, but they are seeing an area and exploiting. Not fraud
If they got some dodgy 1GB RAM and fudged it to say it was a 16GB stick - fair enough, but using a tool to buy low so you can sell high,
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Monday 2nd March 2026 22:29 GMT Michael Hoffmann
Re: OK they are bastards, but
You saved me from writing the same thing. I didn't get the "fraudster" accusation.
It's not like you can buy up DDR3 and relabel it to sell as DDR5, unless out right not delivering the goods - in which case why even buy up that old stock? Just sell non-existent RAM, now that would be fraud.
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Monday 2nd March 2026 19:12 GMT Nate Amsden
damage done already
Got a price estimate back from HPE last week memory that I quoted in October is 10.6X more last week with a 2 week expiration time on the cost. For me at least that just means not buying anything DDR5 related this year(I have nothing that uses DDR5 today). Can stick with my old servers/storage for another year, no capacity issues at all. I really wanted to upgrade some of my older systems(oldest in service servers just entered their 12th year of operation), after waiting years to get budget I finally got some this year...guess I will use what I can to refresh network gear, some of which is 10-11 years old.
At least everything is on 3rd party HW support, and the reliability of all of my gear has been outstanding.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
