Sneaker Botters Exploit Travis Scott x Fragment x Air Jordan 1 Drop

After months of build-up, Travis Scott and Fragment Design’s Air Jordan 1 High collaboration finally released via a raffle on the Houston rapper’s website yesterday. For the majority of shoppers, a checkout email signifying a successful raffle entry and granting the ability to buy a pair never arrived, but certain entrants are claiming they had the upper hand at securing multiple pairs of the coveted collab thanks to bots.

Shortly after the raffle closed last night, user @7zarc on Twitter posted a screenshot claiming they’d successfully entered the raffle 25,000 times using automated bot software called Linear AIO. As a follow-up, they posted a screenshot showing a handful of pending transactions suggesting they were able to purchase the sneakers.

A similar, since-deleted tweet from Twitter user @aycdjake showed a screenshot of a bot that created 32,000 entries. The same user posted another tweet, which was also later deleted, showing an email inbox with 87 new messages for checkouts on pairs of the Travis Scott x Fragment Design x Air Jordan 1s.

This prompted frustration from Travis fans in the Cactus Jack discord channel and on Twitter, where users posted links to the botters’ tweets and complained about the release being compromised. Many of them tagged Travis Scott, hopeful that alerting the rapper would somehow thwart bot users and resellers from buying the shoes.

With a suggested retail price of $200, the Travis Scott x Fragment Design x Air Jordan 1 is currently reselling for between $2,000 and $3,000 on aftermarket sites like StockX and GOAT.

It’s unclear if the botters who compromised the release will actually see their pairs ship, and it’s difficult to verify their claims—especially given the frequent trolling that happens on social media for big releases like this. But the incident has again stoked fears that manually buying a pair of limited sneakers online is nearly impossible.