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

Re:It worked for Waits but it won't for Cyrus

[plastbox]

And that would be a bad thing how exactly? Less brainwashing of our youngsters, and very easy to bag'n'tag the freakoes who attend the latest Disney "pre-teen pop-queen" shows despite not having the kids there as an excuse. ^^

Re:What a lot of work.

[hairyfeet]

As a southerner I can point out there was actually a generational reason why black folks like certain fried chicken and white folks don't. It is because the share croppers didn't have the land for raising beef, but did have enough land for chickens and pigs, and while the poor white folks were Irish and Scottish, and liked their foods bland, the black folks were from Africa and the Caribbean, and their food had more spices. That is why the black folks go to Popeye's (they prefer the taste of the peanut oil and spices Popeye's uses) and the white folks are getting the mild stuff at KFC, it is just a natural cultural preference, nothing more.

Or are you gonna say next it is racist to say Mexicans like hot peppers in their cuisine and Italians use a lot of tomatoes in their traditional dishes? Every culture has their own general preferences for food, nothing racist about that, it is just different tastes, which if anyone were to study it I'm sure it would be traced back to different concentrations of taste buds from those that are from different regions. American black culture has a history of a taste for soul food, of which chicken cooked in certain ways is traditional, that is just a fact and is no different than the fact that those of us from Irish backgrounds are used to milder foods because that is what grandma used to make. It is culture and heritage and the quicker the PC police stop screaming racist for daring not to have everyone have an identical palate the better.

Finally as for Popeye's? I spent nearly 5 years touring the south with a black blues band. They used to joke I was the "affirmative action token white boy" and on the road we ate a LOT of fried chicken, and they would always stop at KFC for me before they headed over to Popeye's for themselves. They said KFC tasted like cardboard, while I didn't care for the peanut oil and spices used in Popeye's batter. Or is that observation racist too?