Scalpers Earned $25M Gaming Online Ticket Sellers

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."

Comments

Anti scalpers scheme that works...

[BartholomewBernsteyn]

In his Glitter and Doom tour, Tom Waits pioneered an effective anti scalpers scheme.

Tickets for Waits' summer shows were limited to two per person but, in an effort to beat ticket touts, a valid I.D. (passport or driving licence) matching the name on the ticket was required to gain entry. Any concert-goer who did not have a valid I.D. or was found to be in possession of a ticket that had been resold – electronic scanners were employed – was not allowed in and did not get a refund.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitter_and_Doom_Tour#Tickets

Dutch Auction

[Dr_Barnowl]

How about a dutch auction?

Start the price offensively high, and drop it as the concert date approaches. The organiser gets paid the price the market will bear, the scalpers are out of the loop - because by definition, anyone willing to pay a stupid price for a guaranteed ticket will already have paid it.

You still get the same effective problem - that rich fans are prioritised over poor fans, but more money goes to the artist and the organiser, so they could throw a few benefit concerts or something to sweeten the deal.

Re:Dutch Auction

[jonadab]

> If I wait for the best tickets to drop in price,
> they may sell out before they reach the pricelevel
> I'm willing to pay, so I need to buy the second best
> tickets, but these sold out at $100 even earlier.

This is easily solved, and along with it the problem that some people might rank the seats differently than others (e.g., one guy wants to be right in front of the speakers, and somebody else would rather be near the center of the stage).

The solution is simple: all the tickets are the same price on any given day. Let's say you start selling the tickets 100 days before the event, at ludicrously obscene prices (say, a million bucks a seat). You wait, because you don't have a million bucks, and if you did you wouldn't spend it on tickets for a single concert, because you're at least partially sane. So you wait. Each day the price goes down. After a week or so, it's down to eighty grand per seat, which you still can't afford, but only four tickets have sold, to some billionaire who just had to be next to the center aisle in the front row no matter what. When the price comes down to twenty grand per seat, a couple of CEOs snap up the private VIP booth, and a lunatic-fringe extreme fan from Ann Arbor sells his truck and buys a front-row seat. But there are still seats available in the front row, and the price is coming down...

Furthermore, this system and the current system aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. They could split up the seats in a predetermined way and sell some of them at fixed prices and others in the manner described above. The proportions (how many tickets are sold each way) would be up to the organizers of the concert, I suppose (though it might also be a negotiating point when you're trying to book popular performers).

For simplicity, we'll say you divide the seats in half down the middle of the center aisle. All the seats left of center are sold for the same low price of $150/seat (or whatever) until they're gone, but the seats to the right of the center aisle are priced obscenely high at first, and then the price gradually drops until they're all sold out (probably somewhere in the $250-$500 range, though of course the exact price is going to depend on the popularity of the performers and various other factors).

Are you telling me...

[cvtan]

that Stubhub is owned by Ticketmaster? I can't believe this. The last two times I tried to get into concerts at the Rochester Auditorium Theater and the War Memorial (Blue Cross Arena), it was difficult. Somehow all the good seats vanished almost immediately. But no, there are seats that magically appear on Stubhub. All you have to do is pay $300 for a $75 seat. Infuriated, I refused (obviously, I've been out of the loop for a while). So for one concert I bought tickets from someone on eBay (double the face value!) and for the other I just got cheap tickets in a poor location. Apparently this kind of poor service has no effect since the venues are sold out anyway. This makes me not want to go to events like this and just buy the DVD! Maybe you have to be a teenager to put up with this BS. I still have the antiquated belief that ticket resellers should not make more money than the artists or promoters. You don't see Wallstreet brokers doing this. Oh, wait...

"Bots" were their own, not bot farm

[michaelmalak]

Although the indictment makes heavy use of the word "bot", Wiseguys did not use viruses or trojans to create their bot farm. They paid for it themselves, with their own computers, purchasing varied IP addresses from varied ISPs across the U.S. to prevent Ticketmaster's et al IP address blocking.

In the old days, ticket wholesalers would hire hobos to stand in physical line. In the Internet era, is it now necessary for ticket wholesalers to not only put a hobo in front of a computer, but to apply for a credit card for the hobo as well? And this is because Slashdot readers now all of a sudden support click-through EULA's on websites? The crux of the indictment is that Wiseguys defeated Ticketmaster's et al human identification by defeating Captchas and using purchased varied IP addresses.

The ticket windows (Ticketmaster et al) are trying to engage in price control, which never works. Ticket windows had limited success in outlawing ticket brokers. Now in the Internet era it seems ticket windows have discovered a legal avenue to harass the ticket brokers by calling automated Captcha completion "hacking".

Wiseguys never engaged in malware or theft. They merely sought to purchase what the ticket windows had for sale in response to the market distortions -- in the form of price controls -- the ticket windows had set up.

Re:Why is it illegal?

[twidarkling]

You missed the point. The scalper did you a service by even giving you the chance to see the concert. If there were no scalpers and every ticket sold was legit then there would be no tickets on ebay and your action of missing the ticket sale means you have zero options to attend.

Logical fallacy present. You're assuming tickets would have sold at the same rate whether scalpers were present or not. This is pretty laughable (appeal to ridicule *points and laughs* ). If there wasn't monetary interests being indulged, you'd have much slower movement of tickets by people with legitimate interests involved. This is patently obvious simply because there's fewer people involved. Scalpers create *artificial* demand. They are the antithesis of free market. After all, they don't care if they sell ALL their tickets, just that they make a profit, so the more they buy, the higher they can set *their* per ticket price, and the fewer overall they'd have to sell. Scalpers don't provide a service, they break the system.

Re:What a lot of work.

[Scratch-O-Matic]

The problem is that the CAPTCHA approach is flawed. Any similar type of challenge-response system can be abused for illegal activity.

I met a guy who was a pilot in Vietnam. They had (and still have) a system where everyone carries a card with a grid of numbers and letters on it, and you can authenticate someone over the radio by picking a couple spots on the grid and they respond with, for example, the character adjacent to them. Well, he forgot his card one day and was queried by a controlling agency using the authentication card. He told them to stand by, switched frequencies, and issued the same challenge to another agency. They responded, and he switched back and passed it along to successfully authenticate himself.