Scalping bots overwhelm DDR5 retailer, outnumber real humans 10 to 1

Jérôme Segura, a cybersecurity researcher who also happens to be the VP of Threat Research at Datadome has revealed an interesting yet alarming tidbit about the current DDR5 market. 

According to his findings, a whopping 91% of all traffic hitting a specific retailer's DDR5 RAM product pages appears to now be solely composed of bots. A similar report was published earlier this year in March, which indicated that only one in six visitors on the same website were actual humans. 

While this is definitely quite alarming. It is also rather unsurprising. As Jerome himself notes, scalping has always terrorized markets with high demand and low supply, such as GPUs, consoles, and now, thanks to the DRAM shortage, DDR5 RAM.

For instance, a consumer-grade 32 GB DDR5-6400 RAM kit from Crucial was priced at roughly $88 last year in September. The price shot up to around $270 in December of that year and subsequently up to a whopping $400 in June of this year. Right now, the same kit costs an eye-watering $480 on Amazon, with occasional dips here and there. 

Over the past few weeks and months, we have witnessed several OEMs jacking up prices to keep up with the DDR5 shortages. Even industries that do not make much use of DRAM are also being affected by it. For instance, major mini-LED player KTC recently revealed that they were also planning on introducing price hikes in order to keep up with component prices.

Sony has also been forced to delay its next generation consoles, owing to the same reason. Given that the DDR5 shortage is not expected to ease until at least 2028, the future sure does appear rather grim for gamers and consumer technology enthusiasts in general.