Walmart Tricked Into Selling PS4 For $90

Walmart recently announced a price-matching promotion and said that it will offer customers the same price that they can get through certain online retailers, including Amazon. Looks like some customers used this to their advantage and actually tricked the retailer into selling PlayStation 4 consoles for a fraction of their original retail price. The full retail price for a PlayStation 4 console is $400, some have been able to get it from Walmart for just $90.

Customers who find a better price for a product on the select online retailers only need to show a screenshot of the page to a cashier at checkout in order to request a price match under Walmart promotion. The way this has been misused is shockingly simple.

Anyone who has ever used Amazon for selling products knows how easy it is for someone with a registered selling account to create authentic-looking pages and list items for sale.

Which is why people have taken advantage of listings for new PS4 consoles by third-party sellers on Amazon, which are quite likely to be fake, and claimed price match under Walmart’s promotion. The result? They’ve walked out with PlayStation units for just $90.

Multiple pictures have appeared on Twitter and Reddit showing receipts as well as PlayStation 4 units which were purchased for the aforementioned price. It appears that the cashiers at those Walmart locations didn’t check to see whether the price being quoted online was actually correct before matching it.

This probably won’t work anymore because Walmart might have heard about this scam by now, but it still hasn’t issued a formal statement as yet, and neither has Amazon.

Update: John Forrest Ales, a spokesman for Walmart, reached out to us with the following statement:

“We launched online price matching because it’s the right thing for our customers. It’s making a meaningful difference for people who want to feel confident they’re getting the best price, and we’re committed to matching online prices going forward.

“At the same time, we can’t tolerate fraud or attempts to trick our cashiers. This kind of activity is unfair to the millions of customers who count on us every day for honest value. With this in mind, we’ve updated our policy to clarify that we will match prices from Walmart.com and 30 major online retailers, but we won’t honor prices from marketplace vendors, third-party sellers, auction sites or sites requiring memberships.

“We will continue to listen to feedback from our customers and our cashiers to make sure our online price match policy is working. Customers with questions can read the updated policy by searching ‘online price match’ at Walmart.com.”

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: Amazon, PlayStation 4, walmart