Gold rush greed

Fandoms are meant to be about passion, creativity, and connection. Whether you’re a lifelong Pokémon trainer, a collector of rare anime figures, or a card game enthusiast, these communities thrive on shared excitement and love. But that love is being exploited—and in many ways, turned into a gold mine—by a group of opportunists: scalpers.

I know this firsthand. Recently, I found myself drawn to card collecting, inspired by memories of my dad. He used to collect basketball cards—those glossy, prized pieces featuring both international and local legends. He stored them in a thick album, each card placed with care and pride. I remember flipping through its pages, watching his face light up as he told stories behind the players. It wasn’t just about the cards; it was about meaning, memory, and joy.

Motivated by that, I wanted to start my own collection with Pokémon cards. But every time I visited a store or browsed online, the shelves were empty. If cards were available at all, they were priced at double or triple the original cost. I couldn’t afford the real thing—not because they were rare, but because scalpers had already swept in and taken everything.

So I settled for fake cards.

I bought cheap knockoffs. Not to trick anyone or fake prestige, but to recreate a joy I had never fully experienced. I opened the packs slowly, pretending they were real, letting my imagination fill in the gaps. For just a moment, I felt like I was part of something I had admired from afar. That small joy wasn’t about ownership or value—it was about trying to connect with a culture that had been put behind a paywall.

A scalper is someone who buys up high-demand products, not out of interest or love, but purely for profit. They use bots, preorders, and bulk-buying tactics to hoard items like trading cards, figures, and exclusive merch. Then, they resell them online at steep markups, often just minutes after launch. This manipulates both supply and demand, creating artificial scarcity to cash in on someone else’s excitement. What makes scalping harmful is that it doesn’t just inconvenience fans; it fundamentally alters the way people experience and access fandom.

Scalpers are not collectors. They are not fans. They are market opportunists treating people’s passions like stock to be flipped. In communities like Pokémon, anime, or TCGs, their presence has transformed moments of celebration into battles for access. Limited-edition releases are no longer thrilling—they’re exhausting. Preorders sell out before you can even refresh the page. Product launches feel like lotteries, and the winners are almost always bots.

Scalpers thrive in ecosystems built on hype and exclusivity. The more limited an item is, the more valuable it becomes—so they exploit that limitation. The worst part is that the scarcity is often manufactured. A $50 Elite Trainer Box skyrockets to $200 within hours. A convention-exclusive figure becomes untouchable. In 2022, studies showed that over 60 percent of collectible items that sold out on retail sites were relisted on secondary markets within the same week. That’s not natural demand. That’s manipulation.

This hurts everyone—except the scalpers. Fans are priced out. Newcomers give up before they can begin. Small retailers can’t keep inventory and face pressure to raise prices just to survive. Community spaces grow tense and divided. Even creators lose, as the products they poured time and love into become nothing more than scalped stock. What used to be a fun, healing hobby now feels more like a marketplace rigged against the very people it was meant to serve.

Let’s be clear: reselling is not the problem. It’s normal to sell a duplicate or let go of part of your collection. But scalping is different. It’s an organized, deliberate system of extraction. These individuals don’t participate in fan culture—they drain it. They don’t build relationships or communities. They don’t trade, discuss, or display. They flip, profit, and move on.

They’re not celebrating fandom. They’re commodifying it.

The damage scalpers cause is real, but not irreversible. Fans can push back. Retailers can fight back. And creators can rethink how scarcity is used to generate excitement.

This isn’t about gatekeeping. It’s about protecting a space where everyone can belong.

Fandom was never supposed to be exclusive. It was supposed to be a gathering of hearts, not wallets. It was where we felt seen. Where joy lived. Where collecting wasn’t about cost, but about connection. The moment we let profiteers rewrite that story, we risk losing the very soul of what brought us together in the first place.

They’re not collecting.

They’re extracting.

And it’s time we called it what it is.

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Akia Zuriel De Guzman Besin, 13, has a keen interest in social and political issues and fandom cultures.