JANUARY 2021 PCWorld 7News
TECH NEWS AND TRENDS THAT WILL
AFFECT YOU TODAY AND BEYOND.How much scalpers are making
selling hard-to-get PC hardware
and consoles
A data engineer scans eBay data to give us the awful truth. BY GORDON MAH UNGM
aybe you can’t buy the
hottest new PC hardware
yourself, but scalpers are
ready to sell it to you for a
tidy profit.
These numbers come to us courtesy of
Dev blogger Michael Driscoll (go.pcworld.
com/mdrs). Driscoll, an Oracle Data Engineer
at USG Corp. by day, applies his data skill setsin his off-hours to the scalping market for PC
hardware and consoles. By Driscoll’s analysis,
scalpers have sold at least $82 million in
Ryzen 5000 CPUs, RTX 30-series cards, RX
6000 GPUs, and Xbox Series X and PS
consoles. Most of it is still selling at stupid
levels above the list price, and this is just the
tip of the iceberg.
For example, some 322 Ryzen 9 5950XIMAGE: BRAD CHACOS