What would you do with $30,000 sitting in your bank account at the age of seventeen? While it sounds absurd, this was the honest question I encountered during high school. Earning such a substantial amount at a young age, I thought making money was remarkably easy. Little did I know that this pursuit of money would take me on a roller-coaster ride of successes and pitfalls.
I live in a divided community on 8th Avenue, Brooklyn, known as the real Chinatown in New York. Here, there were two distinct groups: the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor. I was one of the very few “stuck in the middle” examples, inheriting the worst of both worlds – a desire for excellent taste but limited financial means. In high school, we often compared clothes, shoes, and bags. The rich kids could spend their parents’ money to get those, while the poor kids needed to work outside school to afford them. Me? I didn’t have the money to get those and was too lazy to find an actual job outside of school. Therefore, I turned to the internet for money-making ideas.
In 2018, street fashion, particularly brands like Supreme, was at its peak before the pandemic. If you were in Soho Manhattan, you would see someone wearing box logos crossing by every 2 minutes. People would pay thousands of dollars for Supreme Box Logo tee shirts, but they could be bought for just $60 from the Supreme website. A light bulb went off in my head –All I needed was a credit card and I could make a profit. My first attempt with a Supreme hoodie earned me $200. Feeling good while browsing Twitter afterward and I found someone posting a picture of over 100 order confirmation emails from Supreme. Thanks to big data, modern technology surveillance, and social media algorithms, I discovered a new world called sneaker botting and there my journey began.
The thrill of just thinking about potentially securing more than ten orders in a single release day motivated me to dive deeper into the world of sneaker botting. I invested the $200 profit in purchasing a sneaker bot, and from there, my “business” boomed. I was successfully hitting on every release, and my earnings rose exponentially. I had over 15 credit cards under my and my mom’s names, running 20 instances on different virtual machines and Amazon web servers – simulating the actions of 20,000 humans at a machine’s speed. I felt like a king. Controlling all these, my robot kingdom.
One day, I found over $30,000 sitting in my bank account. However, my seventeen-year-old mind went blank; I didn’t know what to do next. I had been so focused on chasing success that I hadn’t stopped to assess my path or where it might lead.
As time passed, I became an admin in a paid Discord group, where members could access information and tools to make money. I was earning $3,000 a month for simply sharing my experiences and tricks. But as more people and capital flooded into the botting industry, the competition intensified. One more person could mean 10,000 humans in actions. Botting became exponentially more challenging and my exhaustion led me to burnout. I was no longer passionate about a release. The whole thing was no longer like before, or maybe I was the one that changed. I didn’t know. The once straightforward path now seemed convoluted and exhausting. I made the difficult decision to detach myself from the all-consuming pursuit of botting and reclaim my connection to reality.
Still part of the group, I encountered a talented developer named Omni. Our discussions about coding fascinated me, and Omni eventually introduced me to computer programming. In 2020, I wrote my first complex computer program that automatically registered Nike accounts using different phone numbers pulled from various APIs. I sold the program for $200, which made me remember what Omni said in a random conversation we had: “Botting is not something people can do forever; people need to find something else they enjoy and can pursue as a viable career.”
After this journey, what do I leave with? Nothing physical, really; the money I’ve made those three years was all spent during the pandemic since I had no income and maintained a lavish lifestyle. When did I discover it? It was when I found no money in my bank account to pay off my credit card bills. What was the resolution? By working a part-time job as a college student and paying them off bit by bit.
It was a hard lesson in bankroll management but it also pushed me to face reality. To this day, I still cherish the valuable lesson that I learned along the journey. While the money may have come and gone, the experiences have shaped my character, and I am grateful for all of this that led me to my true determination to pursue a career path of becoming a successful software engineer.