DDR5 scalping surge: DataDome says bots tuned request rates to evade alarms
DataDome says DDR5 supply constraints tied to AI demand are creating room for scalpers that rely on automated scraping. The company says bots are hitting DDR5 product pages about six times more often than real shoppers.
The report examines one operation that DataDome says generated more than 10 million scraping requests before being blocked. In a one-hour sample, it saw about 50,000 requests across 91 listings, averaging roughly 551 hits per listing. DataDome says that works out to a stock check about every 6.5 seconds for each targeted kit.
© DataDome DataDome claims the scraping was not limited to consumer RAM kits. It says bots also targeted parts of the broader supply chain, including industrial memory vendors and hardware components such as DDR5 sockets and connectors, including SO-DIMM and CAMM2-related parts.
The bot made a mistake, it did not slow down on weekends
What reportedly gave the scraper away was how “machine-like” the browsing looked. DataDome says requests often included cache-busting parameters, sessions frequently did a single page hit and then left, and the traffic ignored normal shopping behavior like search, cart activity, or navigating the site.
© DataDome DataDome says the traffic stayed flat across weekends when human shopping traffic usually drops, and it held a steady ceiling that suggests a tuned rate limit. When something broke, traffic dropped sharply and then snapped back to the same level, which fits an automated system more than organic visitors.
What gave it away is that the bot was doing the same type of queries on weekends, when normally traffic for this retail site drops.
Source: Data Dome , Tom’s Hardware
