Best Buy’s controversial decision to sell Nvidia graphics card behind a $199 membership paywall yesterday seems to have helped some scalpers snag dozens of GPUs.
One scalper claims the paywalling helped them nab 28 graphics cards from Best Buy, one of each available model. “I bought almost $20,000 in GPUs today,” the user known as “Bipper” claimed in a Discord chat room.
The scalpers exploited a catch with Best Buy’s restock of Nvidia’s highly sought-after RTX 3000 products: To buy them, interested customers had to first fork over $199 for an annual membership to Best Buy’s Totaltech perks program.
The decision infuriated PC builders everywhere when GPUs are already hard to find at normal retail prices. In addition, Best Buy is the exclusive retailer for Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards, which are the most affordable GPUs in the RTX 3000 series.
With little choice, many consumers gave up trying to buy the GPUs from Best Buy. However, the Totaltech paywall didn’t deter scalpers. Bipper said it freed up inventory for their bot to purchase.
“I think the fact that it was Totaltech did more to help than anything else. It really limits the number of people that can go after the cards,” they wrote. Bipper later shared a screenshot of their bot successfully purchasing at least 20 GPUs from Best Buy for a value of over $19,000.
The GPU paywalling was so helpful that Bipper claims anyone could have manually bought the Nvidia graphics cards from Best Buy without a bot so long as they had a Totaltech membership.
Bipper wasn’t the only scalper to brag about buying up GPUs from Best Buy during yesterday’s restock. Others also posted screenshots on Discord and Twitter showing their bots snatching up numerous graphics cards from the retailer.
“Not bad for only having one TotalTech account for Best Buy,” wrote one user who purchased four Founders Edition cards from the retailer in yesterday’s restock.
Best Buy didn’t respond to a request for comment, so it’s unclear if the paywalling is a one-time only event or a sign of things to come. But in the past, Best Buy has placed PlayStation 5 sales behind the Totaltech membership requirement, too. Whether the retailer is vetting GPU purchases to stop scalpers from placing multiple orders is also unclear.
PCMag learned of Bipper’s scalping of the GPUs from a reader disgusted with Best Buy’s practices. “I literally have no idea what Best Buy was thinking, but if their intention was to get more cards to individual gamers, this paywall method was by all accounts a horrific and abject failure and only added inventory to the scalper market,” the reader told us via email.
Bipper didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But in the Discord chat, the user said the GPUs they purchased will be sold to a local computer shop, which will allegedly resell them for a slightly higher price.
