Last time I saw this I tried it from a colleague's phone and they got the original price. Refreshed both and the difference remained.
This should really be illegal. And I believe it is here in Europe. That other shit that Chinese sites do ("another user just bought one of the last few remaining!!") is illegal here too. In the end I didn't take the flight and booked the next day from home when it was the cheaper price again.
> The lawsuit quoted an Amazon employee as writing in a 2024 message, “We don’t tell them about the surcharge, we let them assume [it is] GSP-based.”
White collar criminals love putting their crimes in writing, don't they? Not like there's any consequences for it. Seems doubtful that, despite employees literally admitting to it, Amazon will be charged a fine that makes this more than a cost of doing business, that will exceed the profit of the fraud, and of course there will be zero criminal responsibility for the individuals in charge of this racket.
Matt Levine had a good write-up of it - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-09-01/ama...
Rather than running a real auction, since they are the beneficiary of a higher ad bid, then run a bot that calculates the "best second price bid" just so accurate, that the winner pays their full bid.
The way "second price auctions" are advertised to work is that they incentivize bidders to put in their real max bid, because the winner only pays the 2nd place price + $0.01, so if the bids are $5, $4 and $3.. the winner pays $4.01 ...
Instead Amazon constructed a fake ad bidding bot & pushed up the second price by placing higher bids. And in cases that the Amazon bot won the auction, they still gave it to the high bidder at their bid price! This became noticeable when bid winners were getting charge their bid price which should be rare in second price auctions! Its win-win for the Amazon bot to bid high because they never actually pay for the ad themselves.