Pokémon Trading Card Game: Mega Evolution Perfect Order Elite Trainer Box

A: Because they want Money

A: I beat them today. It was a pain, but I scored a box this afternoon. First time I’ve beat the bots. Keep refreshing; every 1-3 minutes there are some available.

A: They don't care because they are a for profit company. They don't care about the average consumer, only their bottom dollar. Bots still have to buy the product and that is fine with Target.

A: They never will. Lock in

A: Simply adding a bot filter thing would do the job.

A: These etbs are bricks that's why your manually copping

A: ima get mad as a kid that just started collecting again i an just sad

A: The current implementation appears heavily optimized for throughput rather than integrity, and as a result, automated purchasing networks are consistently clearing inventory before legitimate users can complete checkout. From an architectural standpoint, there are multiple layered mitigations that could materially reduce bot success rates without degrading normal user experience. These include strict per-SKU purchase limits enforced across normalized entities (account, payment token, shipping address hash, device fingerprint), mandatory pre-queue authentication with verified payment methods, and cryptographically signed, device-bound queue tokens that invalidate on IP or fingerprint change. At the network layer, stronger ASN reputation filtering, residential proxy heuristics, request velocity throttling, and anomaly detection based on inter-request timing entropy would meaningfully disrupt high-scale automation. At the application layer, behavioral scoring models (mouse movement entropy, scroll variance, event timing jitter, DOM interaction sequencing) combined with progressive friction (selective CAPTCHA, step-up verification triggered only on elevated risk scores) would significantly increase automation cost without harming legitimate buyers. Inventory release strategies could also be improved by implementing randomized allocation windows or lottery-based draws rather than purely speed-based checkout, as well as staggered inventory waves to prevent single-event clearing. Individually, these controls are bypassable. In combination, they create meaningful economic friction against bot networks operating at scale. At present, the system appears vulnerable to distributed automation leveraging proxy rotation and account cycling. I strongly urge you to escalate this to your fraud prevention, e-commerce security, and infrastructure teams to reassess the balance between sell-through velocity and marketplace integrity. Without layered anti-automation controls, legitimate customers will continue to be systematically disadvantaged.