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.
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.