Pokemon collectors demand retailers crack down on checkout bots 'killing the hobby'

Kym O'Brien wanted to buy his daughters a gift. It was meant to be simple—a reward for their hard work, and a way to share something he'd loved since the 1990s: Pokemon cards. But when the 30th anniversary sets dropped at Kmart and Target, he couldn't get them. Not because they sold out. Because they were never there to begin with, at least not for him.

O'Brien discovered he wasn't alone. Thousands of collectors across Australia were hitting the same wall: online stock vanishing in seconds, checkout pages timing out, error messages cascading. The culprit wasn't demand from other collectors. It was software. Automated bots—programs designed to monitor for releases, add items to cart, and complete checkout faster than any human could refresh a page—were systematically buying up inventory before real customers even knew it was available. One Reddit user claimed more than 5,000 units disappeared through Kmart's backend in a single drop. The bots would then flip those cards on resale marketplaces for triple or quadruple the retail price within minutes.

Frustrated, O'Brien started a petition. He wanted Kmart and Target to do what their competitors were already doing: implement real protections. The petition gathered over 4,000 signatures. In it, O'Brien laid out what he'd observed: the constant page refreshing, the checkout errors, the sense of futility. "It's not just a few rogue purchases," said Liam Mayron, a director at Fastly, a company that monitors internet traffic. "Automated traffic often overwhelms retailer websites during these launches." The bots could even find hidden product pages before they went live.

O'Brien wasn't asking for the impossible. He pointed to what EB Games and JB Hi-Fi were already doing: hard account limits, manual validation, purchase history checks that automatically cancelled duplicate orders from the same person within 12 months. He noted that Kmart itself enforced per-customer limits in physical stores—one item over $20, five items under. Yet online, customers could place unlimited orders across multiple transactions. "We don't understand why Kmart doesn't block this behaviour," O'Brien wrote. "This indicates it can be done – there just needs to be a level of effort actually put in."

Sydney collector Sebastian-Felipe Castano told local media that the situation had fundamentally changed how people bought cards. "You are more guaranteed a product lining up outside a store at a ridiculous time," he said. People were camping out overnight for in-store releases because online shopping had become a lottery rigged against them. O'Brien said the toll was real. Long-term collectors were exhausted. Parents couldn't buy their kids a simple present at a fair price. "It's almost killing the hobby," he said. "It's the greedy few that's actually taking away from the majority, and they're doing it for their own benefit."

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. They claimed to have measures in place and said they were "reviewing the feedback we have received." They would not detail their technological safeguards, citing security concerns. The response was careful, noncommittal. For collectors like O'Brien, it wasn't enough. The question now is whether the pressure from thousands of frustrated customers will push retailers to act, or whether the bots will continue to hollow out a hobby that has survived for three decades.