As the holiday season approaches, consumers are becoming angry that software robots known as “bots,” known to scoop up concert tickets before the general public, are now doing the same thing for this season’s hottest toys.

Last year Mindy Macdonald was on the hunt for a Hatchimal for her daughter, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Not online and not in store because they were all sold out.

She did, however, find it on eBay but it wasn’t cheap. She had to shell out $120 after “bots” were designed to buy them in mass quantities.

“That’s almost double retail what it was going for back then,” said MacDonald. “I feel like people are taking advantage of other people’s places of desperation.”

CTV News technology analyst Carmi Levy said hackers using “bots” to snatch up toys online shows how well they can adapt to new trends.

“We thought this was just a ticket thing, or a concert thing, but it’s a lot bigger than that,” she said. “Now the most popular toys you want to buy online, these scalpers and ‘bots’ are swooping in to get those as well.”

“They’re using exactly the same technology for tickets and what they’re doing, essentially, is predictively polling the website and swooping in as soon as the item goes live. They’re pretending to be human and buying all available stock and turning around and reselling it online for a much higher price.”

The Ontario government recently introduced a law to ban ticket “bots” when it comes to concerts and sporting events.

Under the proposed law, ticket resellers have to disclose more information including the face value of tickets, surcharges and basic contact information. It would also ban tickets from being resold for more than 50 per cent of the face value of the ticket and make it illegal to resell tickets that were known to be bought by bots.

But there’s nothing in place for popular items like toys and electronics.

“These hackers are extremely sophisticated,” Levy said.

“They almost know what we want before we want it and they can target it on their website of choice before we can even load that first page.”