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Scalpers Earned $25M Gaming Online Ticket Sellers

Posted by kdawson on from the flash-crowd-at-the-ticket-queue dept.

SeattleGameboy writes "An indictment has been issued for online ticket brokers known as 'Wiseguy Tickets and Seats of San Francisco.' From 2002 to 2009, they used bots, server farms, and CAPTCHA hacking to buy vast number of premium tickets (Springsteen, Miley Cyrus, NFL, MLB playoffs, etc.) and made $25 million in profits. 'They wrote a script that impersonated users trying to access Facebook, and downloaded hundreds of thousands of possible CAPTCHA challenges from reCAPTCHA. They identified the file ID of each CAPTCHA challenge and created a database of CAPTCHA "answers" to correspond to each ID. The bot would then identify the file ID of a challenge at Ticketmaster and feed back the corresponding answer. The bot also mimicked human behavior by occasionally making mistakes in typing the answer, the authorities said.' I guess you can break any system like CAPTCHA if you want it badly enough."

4 of 574 comments (clear)

  1. What a lot of work. by dtmos · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wouldn't it have been easier just to make the money legitimately?

    1. Re:What a lot of work. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      It's not racist if it's true. For instance, the Popeyes down the street is always filled with all black guys, and usually just that fat 1 white guy. So asserting that black people love fried chicken isn't racist. Also, here is a "racist" news story for your enjoyment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pyW6w5B7Aw

  2. Well done. by aerthling · · Score: 4, Funny

    $25m seems an entirely adequate reward for circumventing reCAPTCHA.

  3. $25 million gaming dollars by bryan1945 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Is this like the South Park episode where Butters earned $300 million theoretical Internet dollars?

    --
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