Microsoft collaborated with a clothing manufacturer to launch official boots in the Halo style. These strictly limited boots sold out in a day. Now they are appearing again on eBay, but for significantly more money.
What are these boots? The Halo boots are modeled after the Spartan armor of the protagonist of the Halo series, Master Chief. Spartans are super soldiers, and the boots come in the look of their characteristic olive-green armor.
The boots were distributed by Wolverine, an American manufacturer that has been making boots and other workwear for 139 years. The design here is usually simple, but robust.
The Halo boots have special features such as the UNSC logo and an embossed 117, the Spartan number of Master Chief. Genuine leather is used as the main material for the boots.
What makes the boots special? Only 117 pieces of the official Halo boots were produced. They are, therefore, extremely limited. They hit the market on March 29, but could only be delivered to the USA.
The price directly at Wolverine was $225, equivalent to about €202. After less than a day, they were sold out. Today, on March 30, they are already back on eBay, but significantly more expensive.
Scalpers sell limited boots for ten times the price
On the American eBay website, there are several listings for the boots. The prices here range from about $1,400 to as high as $2,500 (around €1,250 – €2,250). Apparently, several pairs of boots were bought just to sell them at a higher price.
This practice is called “scalping”, and it has been widespread for some time. Scalpers buy limited goods at retail price to resell them with horrific markups. Recently, this has happened frequently in the gaming sector.
Especially large numbers have emerged, for example, with graphics cards. Due to supply bottlenecks, there are only a few copies of the popular RTX 3000 series. Scalpers bought many of them and made over €15.2 million profit on eBay.
Scalpers have also profited from consoles. The PS5 and Xbox Series X, for example, were bought up and resold. eBay has already changed its policies to protect customers from scalpers.
Often, such limited offers are bought up directly by bots, so honest buyers hardly have a chance. At least some clever users are already fighting back against this. They simply post fake listings online, without actually selling any goods. This tricks the bots and honest buyers simply get their money back:
RTX 3080 on eBay for now up to $99,900 – Users respond with fake bids and cardboard versions
