Most likely related to high-demand, limited run sneaker "drops", which people then resell on the secondary market. Sneaker-scalpers, if you will. It's a problem because it prevents legit buyers from getting in on the sale.
Or as ALittleLight says, auction them?
Edit: OK, I know, limited editions. Like numbered and signed prints. But it's arguable that people who want them the most will get them. Even if it's just for resale. Doesn't seem like the seller's responsibility.
sounds like to me that the seller doesn't want the scalper to sell outside the official channels imho. It might dilute the brand as well.
And why brand dilution? Scalpers sell at a premium, not discounted.
The real problem is supply. Popular tickets are scalped because there's only so many tickets. Then unpopular tickets are scalped because it was so easy to scalp the popular ones.
There's only so many sneakers that can be made: making more chews up the supply chain for something which isn't _truly_ being consumed.
Back to the point at hand, I don’t like recaptcha in principle. But given my view from both sides of the table, it’s one of very few things that consistently works for sophisticated adversaries. It’s about as close to a silver bullet as they come, with the additional upside that it’s the absolute easiest thing to implement - in both an absolute sense and relative to the return. And once you have, most of what you can implement beyond recaptcha has diminishing returns in comparison.
All of that being said, I would be inclined to agree that most websites and apps don’t need recaptcha, simply because most of them aren’t worthwhile targets for the types of attacks recaptcha is singularly effective against.
The more successful quant funds will often build out internal research teams to do this. For example, both Two Sigma and Millennium have (not so well advertised) research teams devoted to this kind of data collection internally.