It's dirty, it's underhanded, it's unethical. And yeah, you totally wish you'd thought of it.
Sony's PlayStation 4 is currently selling for $399, though there are deals on the horizon for Black Friday that include nice discounts on consoles and bundles. But apparently those deals just aren't enough for some people — some very clever people who aren't afraid to cheat.
CNBC reports that an undetermined number of consumers have been exploiting Wal-Mart's price match policy to trick the retail giant into selling them PS4s at a discount that's more than 75 percent off. These prices are so low, Wal-Mart takes a loss on each one.
How do they do it? Well, apparently these nefariously enterprising gamers are registered as authorized Amazon sellers, since they created fake product listing pages at amazon.com that showed PlayStation 4 consoles for sale at prices as low as $89. Take a screencap of said page and show it to a cashier at Wal-Mart, and boom -- you get a next-gen console at less than you can buy a last-gen console for.
Wal-Mart only recently added online retailers to its list of competitors it will price-match, on Nov. 13. So customers who decided to cheat the system have only been able to for the last week or so. And as cheaters are wont to do, of course they couldn't just get away with it and keep it to themselves. They had to go online and gloat! Which is how the scam came to light.
LMAO Amazon and Walmart jig just got ps4 for $97 pic.twitter.com/pEIKsCvdHN
— Taahaa Mobeen (@taahaa8) November 18, 2014
Wal-Mart has not yet made any kind of statement about these scammers, but one assumes they're already working on ways to keep it from continuing to happen. The big question is whether or not they'll cancel the whole online retailer price-matching promotion altogether. Will a few bad apples spoil the bunch? We'll see.
Update: Wal-Mart has responded by updating its price-matching policy not to include marketplace or third-party vendors. Only deals that come directly from big-name retailers themselves.
