We've been getting this as well. The culprits always initially place a TON of orders all at once, which is what originally made us suspicious. We went from maybe 150-200 online orders per day to a constant deluge of orders for about three days, most of which were for the same entity.
The thing that had us not realizing what was going on and was eventually really confusing to us was that the books they're buying are not ... special? In our case, at least, they're not buying rare or hard to find books. They may be out of print, but they're books we see multiple copies a month of, and they were (for a while) paying double or more what we had them priced for. (This is to do with how online storefronts adjust prices and how that can go up and down depending on *waves hands* weird fluctuations of the market. Most of these orders come through Alibris and I'm not actually well-informed about how their system works. My job is not actually interfacing with the online retailers in any way other than pulling and packaging orders our store gets.)
The combination of a gazillion orders and prices being paid got our attention, and one of my co-workers looked up the business name on the order sheets. He found a website that states its business model is 'recycling books', which is sus as hell. But in the absence of any actual information there's not much we can do about it. We could theoretically cancel all orders coming from those businesses but the damage that would do to our ability to sell via any online storefronts would be catastrophic. Until Amazon, Alibris, Ebay, et al decide to do something about these accounts we're kind of stuck.
Also, they keep changing accounts and names. Currently they're using Color + Bird as their business names. It was Green Parrot for a while. As of Sunday it was Red Sparrow.
TLDR, we're not primarily an antiquarian book dealer, but we've also been getting hit with this nonsense. This article and a forum for Amazon Marketplace sellers are the only places other than my co-workers I've even seen talking about this. I'll probably sniff around the antiquarian sellers at the local antiquarian book fair in October to find out if they're also getting this.
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