[phil21]

You slip the doorman $50 to hold tracking numbers of packages you're having sent to random units in the building. Or just promise him a unit at MSRP for his help.

These sorts of things are pretty cheaply routed around for those making scalping into a volume business.

Sure you can probably lock things down so you catch the vast majority of these mechanisms, but not without impacting legitimate users. So it's a tradeoff of how much more of a hassle do you want to make things for legitimate customers vs. how much you want to lock out resellers.

You don't even really need a doorman in many buildings either. There will be a shared mail room (if you're lucky) where packages get dropped. If you work from home you just watch the UPS/Fedex tracking and run down the moment it gets delivered to snag it before anyone else sees it.

The few folks I know who did this sort of thing were less professionals making a living off it, and more someone who wanted to subsidize their gaming habit by grabbing 3 or 4 units and keeping one while flipping the rest. They'd just ship to friends/family. The folks buying 50 units at a time are pretty rare from what I can tell.

[foobarchu]

This doesn't seem like a reason not to do address based limiting, just a reason it wouldn't be perfect.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

[kolinko]

If you live in a house you can generate tens of thousands of addresses that will be delivered to you without much problem.

You just begin inventing apt. numbers - having up to a thousand apts in a building is not suspicious. And once you cross a thousand, you can invent new buildings by strapping letter names to your home number, so that gives you a-z * 1000 = 24000 unique addresses you can generate easily. Without much hassle you could extend that to a million.

Requiring a unique mailing address is just as pointless as a unique email.

[apple4ever]

But we have databases of addresses and we can tell if it actually has 1000 apartments.

[ill13]

Who's updating those db's when I turn my single family in to a tri-plex , then convert it to an 10 unit apartment complex?

The answer is "no one".

[Strom]

That depends on where you live. In my country the government keeps an up-to-date db. Everything else in the country depends on and queries that db too, so it's not isolated.