Chinese scalpers use app for bulk iPhone purchases
Need to anonymously purchase and scramble a bunch of iPhones as quickly as possible after they go on sale in China? There's an app for that, but it's not what you think. MicGadget has a quick walkthrough of a Windows app in Chinese that iPhone scalpers in that country apparently use to purchase and obtain iPhones for the grey and black markets.
The way it works is that a scalper sets up a series of users with this Windows app (which is mostly in Chinese as you can see above) that is preloaded with credit card and booking information, and alerts the user when iPhone sales go live, so they can snap an iPhone up as quickly as possible.
I presume this is all legal in some technical fashion, or at least, even if Apple did want to prevent sales like this, it would have a hard time telling which online purchases were coming from legitimate buyers and which were from this software. There must be a fair amount of money in this as well -- the person who posted pictures of this software apparently wanted to hire more workers to buy these iPhones for him or her. And this is exactly the kind of tool that caused such a frenzy at the recent Hong Kong iPhone 4S sale.
Apple is continuing to try to meet demand in Asia, but software like this shows the company has a little way to go. This seems like a pretty simple tool, but the fact that scalpers have operations this complex at all means that there's a lot more room for Apple's official sales to grow overseas.
