According to
Forbes, A group of Democratic lawmakers have introduced a new bill that sets out to stop
“Cyber Grinches”, or more commonly known as
Scalper Bots in the action figure collecting community.
The "Stop Grinch Bots Act" will crack down on the use of automated software which can purchase hundreds of items in a matter of seconds online. This is something that has become commonly used by scalpers in the action figure collecting community in order to buy up online exclusives and other hard to get collectibles, making them very hard for anyone else to get. They then turn around and re-sell the items at a significantly marked up price on the secondary market.
This new act would be an extension of the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, which banned “ticket bots” from bypassing controls to buy tickets for public events like concerts and sports games in 2016. It also made it illegal for scalpers to sell any tickets acquired by those bots. If passed, The Stop Grinch Bots Act would apply this same mechanism to all online retail stores and then would task the Federal Trade Commission with enforcing the law, if passed.
