What does that have to with my point? Bots used to purchase inventory (and that aren't otherwise commiting fraud by using stolen credit cards or something) are not malicious.
if a single bot controller can buy up an entire stock of limited items legitimately, that is malicious as that company is not longer able to meet the needs of their consumers. That's bad for the company.
If it's profitable for anyone to resell, that implies the company priced below the market price and there would be a shortage without scalpers. So the company is unable to meet the needs of its customers in any event. Scalpers just make it somewhat more efficient.
It is illegal if the website’s TOS for making a purchase prohibits the use of automated software.
It doesn't matter if it's legal, it matters if the website owner doesn't want x doing y on their site. A bot consistently not abiding by owners' intent is inheritly malicious.
Are they following the sneaker website's robots.txt while doing that? If not, they are probably violating the AWS terms regardless of whether you believe that activity is "malicious."
if they're running on AWS, which most crawlers are not
When I've run scraping software in the past I used DigitalOcean, which doesn't contain a requirement to abide by robots.txt. As far as I can tell it's both legal and consistent with their ToS to run a program that makes purchases on a website.
There's no way you're in this conversation without being aware that scalping is a controversial practice at best.
https://theconversation.com/the-economics-of-ticket-scalping...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_scalping