Pokemon collectors demand retailers crack down on bot scalpers 'killing the hobby'

Kym O'Brien has been collecting Pokemon cards since the franchise launched in the 1990s. He passed the hobby to his two daughters. When the 30th anniversary sets dropped, he wanted to buy them as a reward for the girls' hard work. He couldn't get a single pack through Kmart or Target. The stock vanished before he could even click add-to-cart.

This is not a personal misfortune. It is a systemic problem that has now drawn the attention of over 4,000 people who signed O'Brien's online petition demanding that Australia's major retailers take action against automated checkout bots—software that scalpers use to buy up scarce products at inhuman speed, then resell them at inflated prices. The bots monitor for product releases, add items to cart, complete checkout, and repeat across dozens of accounts in seconds, circumventing per-customer purchase limits that exist only at the register level. Online inventory depletes almost instantly. Real customers see error messages. The servers time out. By the time a human finger lands on the buy button, there is nothing left to buy.

O'Brien described the experience in his petition with the precision of someone who has lived it: constant page refreshing, the add-to-cart button refusing to work, checkout pages that crash under the weight of automated traffic. "It's extremely frustrating," he told 7NEWS.com.au. "It's the greedy few that's actually taking away from the majority, and they're doing it for their own benefit." He added a darker assessment: "It's almost killing the hobby."

The problem extends beyond Australia and beyond Pokemon cards. Checkout bots, scalping bots, and shopping bots are a known plague in e-commerce—they automate the entire purchase pipeline for high-demand, limited-supply goods. According to Liam Mayron, a director at Fastly, automated traffic during product launches can overwhelm retailer websites entirely. Some bots can even uncover hidden product pages before they go public. On Reddit, one collector claimed that more than 5,000 Pokemon card units were "botted through Kmart's backend" before any human customer knew they existed. Sebastian-Felipe Castano, a Sydney collector, told 7NEWS that the situation has become so dire that lining up outside a physical store at an unreasonable hour is now more reliable than trying to buy online. "It's part of a big issue within the trading card game community," he said.

The secondary injury compounds the first. When scalpers do secure stock through bots, they immediately list it on online marketplaces at exorbitant markups. Parents who miss the initial release cannot buy their children a pack at retail price. They face a choice: pay double or triple the legitimate cost, or go without. O'Brien started his petition because he wanted parents to have a genuine chance to buy their kids something at a reasonable price.

He has also done his homework on what works. Kmart's in-store policy already limits purchases: one item per person for anything over $20, five items for anything under. EB Games enforces hard per-account limits and manually validates accounts for terms violations. JB Hi-Fi runs a verification process that automatically cancels orders if a customer has already purchased the same product in the last 12 months. These are not theoretical solutions. They exist. They work. O'Brien's petition explicitly asks why Kmart and Target have not adopted similar measures online. "We don't understand why Kmart doesn't block this behaviour," he wrote, noting that while Kmart's online system does have per-transaction limits, there is nothing preventing a customer from submitting multiple orders for the same product across different transactions.

When 7NEWS.com.au contacted Wesfarmers, Kmart's parent company, a spokesperson acknowledged the problem in measured language. "We know how disappointing it can be for customers to miss out on highly sought-after Pokemon products," they said. The company stated it has measures in place to support fair access and protect the online shopping experience, but declined to detail its technological safeguards, citing the risk of undermining those controls. They said they are reviewing customer feedback and will continue to monitor high-demand releases. It was a holding statement—not a commitment, not a timeline, not a concrete change. For collectors who have been fighting this battle for months, it was not enough.