Scalper Bots Now Outnumber Real RAM Shoppers 9-to-1

Reseller bots are outnumbering real shoppers nearly 9-to-1 in online RAM retail, according to research by DataDome’s Jérôme Segura. Over a two-week span, 91% of traffic to DDR5 RAM listings at one retailer came from automated bots, while only 9% came from actual users.

DDR5 memory is the bots’ primary target because demand is rapidly outpacing supply. Automated scalpers make over 50,000 requests each hour and check listings every 6.5 seconds. These sessions don’t demonstrate any real shopping behavior: Bots hit one page and exit, avoid carts and search, and add cache-busting parameters to every request. This is usually used to monitor stock and prices in real time.

Frustrating as this may be for actual shoppers, it doesn’t come as a surprise. In just the past few months, we’ve seen bots overtake humans in global web traffic. With humans having to compete with bots for everything from concert tickets to new gaming consoles, it was only a matter of time before those bots came for RAM, too.

“When prices spike and supply tightens, bot operators move fast,” Segura wrote on LinkedIn. “They build monitoring infrastructure, corner available stock, and flip it at a premium. The automation here isn’t simple scraping. These are coordinated operations with infrastructure built specifically for this…As long as DDR5 stays scarce, bot pressure on these product pages will stay elevated.”