It's gonna be tricky without the hardware, have you considered getting a portion of Bitcoin with something like Coinbase or Local bitcoins and then turning that into alt coin on an exchange?
Haven't gone the Ebay route myself, just seems like a hassle with the potential for scams.
No, actually trying to go the opposite way, mining the altcoins since they are scrypt and I don't have the hardware to mine bit. Nor the funds to get the multiple asics needed for the current difficulty level of mining bitcoins. Then want to convert the altcoins to cash/bitcoin