The 30th Anniversary Pokémon TCG set dropped last week — fans camped overnight outside stores, resellers had already cleared preorders in their sleep.
Services like Polar Chefs sell subscriptions at
$660/year: bots, virtual cards, spoofed IPs, restock alerts included. One reseller told The Verge he spends under five hours a week on the whole operation — bots buy while he's asleep, he wakes up and sells in bulk. Technically legal; retail bots still aren't banned in the US.The story's sharpest detail: a 72-year-old man was arrested for planting a hidden tracker in a delivery worker's car to intercept a Pokémon shipment. First-degree misdemeanor. A children's franchise, professional bot infrastructure, a GPS ambush — quite the ecosystem.