Can’t get a PlayStation 5? Meet the Grinch bots snapping up the holidays’ hottest gift.

This Christmas, it’s boy vs. bot.

Thirteen-year-old John Coleman has tried everything to buy a Sony PlayStation 5. Coleman, from Bowie, Md., spent his summer cleaning and mowing lawns to save up the $500 the game console is supposed to cost. He stayed up until 5 a.m. when Target’s first units went on sale, and camped in front of a Maryland GameStop on Black Friday. A month after the PS5′s debut, he checks inventory alerts every day after virtual school. No luck.

Ted Brack, 47, chases down new PlayStations in front of two computer monitors in Las Vegas — with very different results.

Brack has bought eight consoles so far from online retailers including Walmart, reselling them for as much as $1,160 on eBay. His secret weapon: bots, or software that helps him know when products are in stock and can hammer retailers with orders faster than regular customers could hope to on their own.

The technology has earned a bah-humbug nickname: Grinch bots.

Computer programs that automate online tasks, called bots, have aligned with the coronavirus pandemic and low inventories of hot products to create a perfect storm of holiday disappointment — or opportunity, depending on your perspective. On Black Friday, when it launched a deal on the console, Walmart.com says it blocked more than 20 million bot attempts in the sale’s first 30 minutes.

Using shopping bots to buy these products is perfectly legal in the United States. Some bot operators are modern scalpers, in it to make money by forcing Santa to pay market prices. Others are computer-savvy shoppers turning to bots out of desperation to fill their own gift lists.

Shopping bots aren’t new, but their use is growing fast. Deployed by people who buy and resell tickets, high-end sneakers, and designer fashion, they’re now expanding into other categories where demand outstrips supply — including grocery delivery slots earlier in the pandemic. Imperva, a cybersecurity firm, says that among its clients, “bad bots” accounted for 24.1% of all traffic in 2019 — up from 20.4% in 2018.

"It's a full-on arms race that keeps escalating," says Thomas Platt, the head of e-commerce at bot-protection firm Netacea.

Stopping the use of bots is easier said than done in an internet economy that connects so many different interests: companies that want to make highly sought-after products and early adopters who will do anything to get them. Retailers primarily invested in turning inventory and online resale marketplaces hoping for a cut. And then there are small-business people like Brack, the Vegas reseller, and the people (often teenagers) who make the bots he uses.

“I can see why somebody would get upset about it. But any time that there’s demand for something, you’re always going to find somebody in between a purchaser and seller,” says Brack, a web developer, who says he’ll make about $30,000 this year from his side hustle.

Brack got his start three years ago buying and reselling limited-edition sneakers and has since been perfecting the art of the “cop,” or successful purchase. His tools include a bot he bought for $250, which he ran on a virtual server in Virginia, which offered a faster connection than his home laptop.

Inside the bot — a desktop application that looks a lot like professional workplace software — he pasted a link to the product he wanted and entered his credit card.

But “copping” hot products isn’t as simple as just switching on an app. Retailers have defenses in place that bot users need to work around. Brack operates proxies to obscure his IP address, and even created slightly tweaked versions of his shipping address, to avoid having multiple orders look suspicious.

Retailers claim they are onto these tricks. “We’ve built, deployed and are continuously updating our own bot detection tools allowing us to successfully block the vast majority of bots we see,” said Jerry Geisler, Walmart’s chief information security officer.

He said that most of the console demand is from real people and that the company audits and cancels orders purchased by bots.

Walmart didn’t stop Brack. When sales began at 9 a.m., his bot went to work. By 9:01, Brack had two PS5s ordered. That afternoon, Walmart did a second stock release, and he bought two more.

Even if bots account for only a fraction of PS5 sales, as Walmart claims, there is clearly a massive amount of genuine demand outstripping the number of new game consoles available. If there were more units on real and virtual shelves, bot operators wouldn’t be able to make so much reselling them.

New consoles come out once every six to seven years, which already creates more anticipation than more frequently updated devices. And this year, the pandemic and limits on social activities have pushed people in droves toward gaming. The pandemic has also disrupted supply chains, according to Lewis Ward, research director of gaming at market research firm IDC, who says “there’s only so much hardware to go around.”

PlayStation maker Sony didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Another reason for the shortage is that the companies don’t want to sell too many units right away.

“They are losing money on these bundles. They have incentive not to run up to a giant number,” says Ward, who points out that consoles can have a 12-year life span. “They’ll make more money on them over time.”

The United States is considering legislation based on the 2016 BOTS Act, which made it illegal to use the software to scalp tickets, and companies like Walmart are asking lawmakers to take action.

Still to be worked out, however, are the details around which exact behavior would be illegal, how to go after international bot operators, and what responsibility retailers would have to report bot behavior to the FTC — or even to stop using bots themselves to check prices on competitors.

Like many other regular buyers, Coleman, the Maryland teenager, has tried some bot techniques, including inventory alerts and having his parents set up accounts on sites such as Target, GameStop, Best Buy, and Walmart.

So far he has managed to get a PS5 in his shopping cart, but it disappears by the time he hits checkout — a common complaint among shoppers across sites.