Back during the heyday of Xbox 360 eBay sales I wrote an article cautioning that the "flippers" of those systems -- people that sold them on eBay at huge profits -- might want to be careful and save up money to pay the tax man when he/she comes calling on them.

Well, I'm gonna speak up early here and encourage the IRS folks to be ready to start combing the auctions of Playstation 3 systems as those systems are "flipped" for huge profits on eBay.  Not that the flippers aren't entitled to make a profit on the boxes if they want to sell them and if someone wants to overpay to get them, but if the sellers do make profits they will owe taxes on the profits and should be made to pay up.

Consider that the profit on selling a $600 system, or perhaps an $800 bundle, for $2000 - $2500 total means that the seller is walking away with somewhere around $1400 in profit on the bundle.

Following up on the article I just wrote about "numbers", take some numbers like say 75,000 systems flipped in that manner (considering that the entire U.S. allotment during the initial month or so is only going to be 400,000 systems, I'd say 75k systems being flipped is probably a low number.  Then again, perhaps more of the initial purchasers really want to keep the system, so who really knows) and multiply that out by even $1,000 per and then figure out how much of that could go into the tax revenue stream?

So, again, I hope that the IRS is ready to go after the flippers and have them pay their fair share back into the tax system.