Topps Sits Next to Supreme on a Sneaker Bot's Hit List

I've lost more drops than I want to admit. You know the drill. The page loads, you hit add to cart, and it's already sold out. Then an hour later the same box shows up on eBay for double.

So I went looking for the bots. I figured I'd find a few sketchy scripts. What I found was a whole industry, and one screenshot that kind of says it all.

This is the target list from a commercial checkout bot called Athena AIO. It was built back in 2021, mostly for sneakers. Look at what's sitting in the middle of it.

Athena AIO's list of target sites. Supreme on line 9. Pokémon Center, Panini America and Topps on lines 15 to 17. Captured Sep 25, 2026.

Topps, sitting right there with Supreme and Foot Locker. (They even misspelled it "Topss.") To the people who build these tools, a hobby box is the same thing as a pair of Jordans. It's product you can flip.

Athena's code has been sitting untouched since 2021, and there's no proof it ever finished its Topps module. But it showed me where to look. And the tools that are selling right now are a lot more polished.

First, some words you'll see a lot

If you're newer to the hobby, this world has its own vocabulary. Here's the short version. (If you're brand new, my guide to starting a Marvel card collection is a good first stop.)

• Monitor: a program that watches a store page nonstop and pings people the second something goes live or restocks.
• Cook group: a paid Discord or Telegram group that shares those alerts, plus tips on what's worth buying and flipping. "Cooking" means getting a successful checkout.
• AIO bot: short for "all in one." Software that tries to check out at many stores, way faster than a person can click.
• ACO: "auto checkout." You pay a service, and their staff runs the bots for you. You don't even need to own one.
• Proxies: borrowed internet addresses that make one person look like hundreds of different shoppers.

Put those together and you get a pipeline. The monitor spots stock, the group sends the alert, the bot checks out, and the product shows up for resale.

This isn't a rumor. It's a market.

I'm not going to link any of these. I'm not sending them traffic. But I want you to see how normal this has become.

Here's a "Topps Bot" for sale for $79.99, with add to cart and auto checkout. It says it can run "in multiple chrome profiles too to run for multiple items simultaneously."

A "Topps Bot" listed at $79.99. Captured Sep 25, 2026.

There are even community ranking sites that rate Topps bots like they're restaurants. This one was updated two days before I captured it.

A community tier list of Topps bots, "updated September 23, 2026." Captured Sep 25, 2026.

And if you don't want to buy one, you can rent one. This rental site lists Stellar AIO for $39 a day and Nike Shoe Bot for $25 a day. (Stellar has a whole guide page just for Topps.)

Bots for rent by the day. Captured Sep 25, 2026.

Or skip the software entirely. One cook group charges $50 a month for "staff-run ACO," meaning their people run the bots for you. It says members have reported "$25M+ in profits" since 2016. That's their claim, not mine.

A cook group selling monitors and staff-run checkout. Captured Sep 25, 2026.

The big players don't hide what they target. At least a dozen tools list Topps. Almost every one of them lists Pokémon Center.

Pokémon Center is ground zero

If Topps is a target, Pokémon Center is the bullseye. Nearly every bot I found supports it. Some sell themselves specifically on getting past its virtual queue, which Pokémon Center added in February 2025 to slow bots down.

The most jaw-dropping example happened in September 2025. PokeBeach reported that before Phantasmal Flames even launched, a cook group managed to buy at least 42,000 items from Pokémon Center.

PokeBeach, Sep 3, 2025. The group admin's handle is blurred. Captured Sep 25, 2026.

42,000. From one group. Before regular collectors could even try.

Then in September 2026, Pokémon Center cancelled thousands of 30th Celebration orders in what looked like a bot sweep. The problem is that real collectors got caught in it too, and the company never made a public statement explaining it.

Kotaku, Sep 8, 2026. Captured Sep 26, 2026.

That's the part that gets me. The fix for bots ends up punishing the people the fix was supposed to protect.

Topps, EQL, and why Marvel collectors should care

Here's a fun one for the non-sport crowd. According to Non-Sport Update, the first time Topps UK used its EQL raffle system was for Marvel Topps Chrome, back in August 2024. So Marvel was the test run. (If you missed it, I wrote about the run on 2024 Topps Chrome Marvel back in August.)

EQL is the entry system Topps uses for its most hyped drops. Instead of racing to click first, you enter a window and winners get picked. Topps says EQL "helps us slow down bots and to deliver a launch that is fair," and that every entry goes through a "verification process that confirms you are a human."

Topps' EQL FAQ page. Captured Sep 26, 2026.

I'll give Topps credit for trying. But regular topps.com checkout is still a mess. Before Chrome Black, one collector posted this:

Quoted in Baseball America, Jun 4, 2026. Captured Sep 25, 2026.

And there's a catch with EQL too. Topps doesn't say how many boxes are in each raffle, so you can't tell your odds. (More on that in Part 2.)

You don't need to be a hacker anymore

The commercial bots are only half of it. On public code sites, I found regular people sharing their own bots for free. I'm not naming any of them. These are individuals, and this post isn't about dragging anyone.

This one is a topps.com purchase bot with a beginner's guide, written for people who have "never used Python before."

A hobbyist's Topps checkout bot, shared publicly. Account name removed. Captured Sep 25, 2026.

That line is what worries me most. These tools used to take real skill to build. Now some of them are written for total beginners. And a few of the bot projects I looked at seem to have been built with help from AI coding assistants, based on how their files and updates were labeled. I can't prove how much the AI did. But the barrier is clearly getting lower.

What about live breaks and auctions?

Quick disclosure: I sell on Whatnot myself. So I went into this part extra carefully.

I did find bots aimed at Whatnot, but they're small hobby projects, not a big commercial business. One is a browser extension that automatically re-bids for you when you get outbid. In August 2026, its creator cut the delay before it re-bids down to milliseconds.

Updates to a hobbyist's Whatnot auto-bid bot, August 2026. Names removed. Captured Sep 25, 2026.

I also found a few giveaway bots that try to auto-enter giveaways, which Whatnot's rules don't allow. Every user "must submit entries manually."

Whatnot's giveaway policy. Captured Sep 25, 2026.

Over on TikTok, the problem looks different. You can straight up buy fake live viewers. 100 of them cost $1.79.

A site selling TikTok live viewers. Captured Sep 25, 2026.

Now the important part. I did not find any breaker or seller publicly saying they use bots to get their product. I've heard the rumors, same as you. But rumors aren't evidence, and I'm not going to point fingers at anyone without proof.

So what's being done?

Stores are slowly moving away from the "fastest click wins" model.

• Topps uses EQL raffles for big drops, and its terms say one account per person, with no getting around purchase limits.
• Pokémon Center has a virtual queue and purchase limits, and has cancelled orders it thinks came from bots.
• Walmart launched a "Collectibles Drawing" in August 2026, with one entry per account.
• GameStop and Walmart added per-customer limits in 2025.

There's also a bill in Congress. The Stopping Grinch Bots Act was reintroduced in December 2025. It would ban using bots to get around purchase limits on retail sites, and ban reselling stuff bought that way. It doesn't mention cards, and as far as I can tell it hasn't passed yet.

Rep. Paul Tonko's office, Dec 17, 2025. Captured Sep 25, 2026.

What you can actually do

1. Enter the raffles. Drawings like EQL and Walmart's give humans a better shot than a checkout race does.
2. Don't feed the flip. Skip the release-day listings at double MSRP when you can. They only work because people pay them. I've written before about the financial pressure this hobby puts on collectors, and chasing release-day prices is a big part of it.
3. Report what you see. If a listing or account looks like it's running a bot, report it to the platform.
4. Ask for transparency. Push companies to publish print runs and raffle odds. It's a lot harder to game a system when everyone can see the numbers.

Next time

Bots are real, and they're a business. But I kept running into a bigger question. Why is there so little product at MSRP in the first place? In Part 2, I dig into where Topps product actually goes before you ever get a shot at it. I touched on Topps allocation and breaker favoritism in my Blasters vs. Hobby post. Part 2 goes a lot deeper.

Part 2 is up: Breakers Get First Dibs. Bots Fight Over the Rest.

Sources

Links go to saved copies, since pages change and some disappear.

• Athena AIO target list (code)
• PokeBeach: scalper groups clear out Phantasmal Flames
• Kotaku: 30th Celebration orders cancelled
• Non-Sport Update: Topps EQL partnership
• Topps EQL FAQ
• Baseball America: 12 pet peeves
• Whatnot giveaway policy
• Stopping Grinch Bots Act press release

Bot vendor pages and hobbyist code are intentionally not linked.