CEX are a bunch of scalpers. That's the allegation being made by customers of the popular second-hand technology and gaming retailer, who are currently selling PlayStation 5 consoles for over £800 in the UK.

At the time of writing, Sony's PlayStation 5 is listed with an £815 price tag, with the console's cheaper diskless version costing £810. These prices are insane. For context, the standard PS5 (with a disk drive) costs £450 in the UK, while the Diskless version costs £360. For the diskless PS5, CEX is selling their consoles with a 125% markup.

CEX is not a traditional retailer; they buy movies, games and hardware from their customers. CEX is a second-hand store, and they are buying PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles from their customers. For a PlayStation 5, CEX will pay around £650 for a boxed console, encouraging existing owners to sell their systems for a quick profit.

In the case of the Xbox Series X, CEX currently sells the system for £690. Like the PlayStation 5, sales of this console are only available in store. Xbox Series S consoles will be sold at their MSRP price, which means that consumers will not make a profit by selling their console to the storefront.

While CEX's actions are completely legal, their inflated next-generation console prices have been criticised by their customers. When many consumers are scrambling to purchase consoles whenever they are available, CEX is purchasing them back to sell at over double their MSRP in some cases. For weeks people have been complaining about console scalpers, and now CEX can be included in their number.