If Santa and his elves are the light that brings us goodwill and cheer, scalpers are the darkness ripping any happiness away – and I’m once again hoping the coming year will be the year they stop ruining the internet.
I’m sure you’ve all had a bad experience wrought by scalpers – folks using an army of bots or simply sheer will (and maybe other tricks) to buy up something in high demand but short supply, only to resell it at a massive markup.
That latter one has been my greatest source of scalping frustration in 2025. Whether it’s Magic: The Gathering’s Secret Lairs or Riftbound’s general availability (even the ability to attend its competitive events), scalpers have taken advantage of the limited supply to jack up prices and ruin everyone’s fun. And while I’m not into the Pokémon TCG scene quite as much, I know scalping is the bane of regular players there, too.
In the fight against scalpers and resellers, we thankfully have a few tricks up our sleeves. I’ve gone round our office to ask the TechRadar team which anti-scalper methods they’ve seen, and these three came out on top as our favorites.
The first is actually a rule being imposed by the UK Government to help keep concert ticket prices in check, and it prevents tickets from being resold at a price that’s higher than the original cost.
Service fees would be accounted for, and the rules would also put caps on these to hopefully prevent the price limit from being undermined, but essentially, this proposed law would prevent resellers from making a profit. This would hurt scalpers but not legitimate fans reselling their concert tickets because they can no longer attend, and helps fans who missed out the first time go and enjoy the artist without needing to pay a premium.
While not ideal for all scenarios, for live events, this approach feels like the gold standard. It punishes scalpers without negatively impacting proper fans.
Another option for live events, or also the sale of a limited availability product, is a ballot draw. I think these work especially well if launched in conjunction with an official fan group, like subscribers to a service or newsletter.
While this randomized queue does require some kind of bot detection and also purchase limits to prevent bad actors from finding ways to abuse the system, it helps give fans an equal chance of getting in on the limited supply, and prevents the irritation caused when you get in a digital line only to find out the thing you wanted sold out while you were still 10,000 places from the front – as with the ballot you know ahead of time that you’ll be able to get something.
The last method I’ll highlight is ‘made to demand’: the system every Magic player wishes Wizards of the Coast would return to for Secret Lair.
Rather than pre-making all of a limited edition preorder item, the seller would instead set a time limit of a few days, weeks, months, however long they want, within which folks can submit a preorder. The product would then be made for every preorder and subsequently shipped out to the buyers.
It can be slow to get everyone what they ordered, sure, but it guarantees everyone gets the limited edition thing – so you don’t end up with folks annoyed they missed out on that Limited Edition PS5 controller or TCG cards because they didn’t get in an online queue at exactly 5pm (it hurts every time).
Is the end in sight?
These solutions are unfortunately not foolproof – they can’t account for all kinds of scalping – but my wish for 2026 is that more retailers will employ these and other techniques they can think up to tackle the scalping epidemic.
Having something you’re excited about being snatched up by malicious middlemen and bots simply so they can sell it back to you at a markup makes almost no one happy – just the opportunistic bad actors who revel in ruining someone else’s day.
I saw many players in my local Riftbound group upset they couldn’t get tickets to the Bologna Regional Qualifier – one of the first major regional events for the game outside of Asia.
Riftbound representatives have since pledged to make sure sales go better in the future and have revealed that you can’t resell tickets for the event. If the name on the order doesn’t match the person who picks up the tournament badges on the day, you won’t get them.
Eliminating scalping won’t make everything right in the world, but it’ll brighten up the days of everyone who has ever had the displeasure of facing it. I expect over the next 12 months we’ll continue to need all the brightness we can get.
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