Slashdot Mirror
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."
Wouldn't it have been easier just to make the money legitimately?
They didn't rob the bank.
They didn't print fake dollar bill.
Every single dollar that they paid good money for purchasing the tickets are REAL money.
What's illegal about what they have done??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Any company calling itself "Wiseguy" is surely going to pull some heat. It's like having a prescription signed "Dr A. Fraud."
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$25m seems an entirely adequate reward for circumventing reCAPTCHA.
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
why user agent knows all info required to identify captcha and why this identification info is unique. Somebody designed weak captcha system and it was broken. End of story.
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.
Between WiseGuy's and Goldman Sachs? Both use computers to game their respective markets.
It's not illegal to resell tickets above face value in most states (check out stub hub for TicketMaster's very own foray into person-to-person ticket sales), and business can be conducted in alternate states with more lax restrictions on ticket resale.
Beyond that, smoking a CAPTCHA system with a bit of cleverness is not hacking or unauthorized access in any reasonable way. This is just a ridiculous attempt to criminalize scuzzy, crappy, opportunistic behavior on the part of one party (scalpers) at the expense of another scuzzy, crappy, opportunistic party (TicketMaster). This strikes me as another case of people trying to misuse the law to remedy the unexpected (only by idiots) defeat of a faulty system. If one reads the article, it seems like Wiseguys (seriously? That's your name?) made purchases on behalf of ticket brokers (ticket-broker is to scalper as escort is to hooker) with detection-avoiding measures in place to keep TicketMaster from blocking the regulars.
It's an attempt by TicketMaster to wipe the egg off of their face, a face that most of America hates with a passion. Perhaps they should find a better way (reverse auction, anyone?) to find the natural market price instead of using time-release scarcity to spur impulse-buys that inevitably result in person-to-person ticket resale later on stub hub where they get to come back for a second skim off the top...
Oh.. right...
That probably works for creating hotmail accounts to send spam from, but not if you need to solve hundreds of thousands of capatchas in the space of a couple of seconds at 7am when the tickets are released for sale.
In the United States, state-issued IDs are associated with age-restricted products and services. A minor can't drive, vote, get a job, see an R-rated movie, or buy tobacco, alcohol, lottery tickets, or over-the-counter medication. So a lot of children just don't have a state-issued ID. Requiring every ticket holder to have a valid ID to attend a concert would block such children from attending. That would work for Tom Waits but not for any of several acts that are popular with preteens, such as the Jonas Brothers or Miley Cyrus.
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...
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Wow ,,,,
Is this like the South Park episode where Butters earned $300 million theoretical Internet dollars?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
So, when we're talking about people already doing stuff that's immoral and often illegal, if the only barrier the captcha offers is "Sure, if you've no moral qualms about what you're doing"... then it seems to me like the most useless gimmick ever. Does anyone actually think that the kind of people we needed captchas against would go, "man, I only wanted to cheat, scam and pollute with email and link spam, but OMG breaking a captcha would be just morally _wrong_. I just can't do _that_."?
Plus, that was not the argument made back then for this crap. Everyone was ranting about how it's such a great defense. If you just tried to point out the ways it can be circumvented, everyone would treat you like you're some kind of a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Well, now it's been officially done, and it's been done for almost a decade, judging by how long these guys operated. Now what?
I'm not saying this as schadenfreude, but I find it genuinely sad that for so long millions of users have been outright excluded from some services, in the name of a solution which just simply doesn't work.
Some captchas are getting so obnoxious, that even I have trouble with some two times out of three, and God help you if you have eyesight problems. And most audio versions I never could decode in the first place. I guess the garbled, low signal to noise thing might not be that bad if you're a native English speaker, but God help you if you aren't.
And for what? For a stupid solution that only works if you have a moral problem with breaking it?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
every sunday a guy shows up with 20 bags of flour. the townspeople line up and buy the flour from the guy, $2/ a bag
one sunday, this asshole shows up really early, buys all 20 bags for $40, turns around and faces the townsfolk and says "ok, that will be $5 a bag from each of you"
understand the illegality yet?
incidentally, this puts the lie to libertarians and free market fundamentalists who believe the market is healthiest when left alone. a healthy market needs to be heavily policed by the government to be healthy, solid fact. because of exactly this sort of market manipulation, of which there are thousand such slimy schemes. there will always be assholes who find natural market imperfections and insert themselves as artificial middle men and gouge the marketplace. they add no value. they parasitically insert themselves in the marketplace and suck it dry
anyone can appreciate how they hurt our economy and hurt the marketplace and the free flow of goods. its a form of robbery what they do, but its diffuse, not specific, and so some people like you can't appreciate their evil up front. i hope you appreciate it now
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ticket scalpers and domain squatters: Love 'em or hate 'em!
Sometimes I believe /.ers are pissed at these types because they didn't think of the idea first.
It's a free market (after all, don't markets want to be free?)...I say kudos to them for figuring out how to scam the scam.
seriously, my example above is not some hypothetical. its going on right now in a thousand markets around the world, always has been, and always will. it adds no value to the economy, its a form of parasitism. you do understand that it is a form of robbery, right? please tell me your neurons can fire on that obvious concept
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
If you leave the door open, then you are stupid for letting in the flies, if you leave the screendoor closed but the main door open, you are stupid in thinking it will be enough to stop a robber, and if you only use a metal plated door, you are stupid in thinking it will stop the terminator. CAPTCHAs have never really worked, even to the new image and text combo ones, i saw that came close once, but it was based on a few QA style system, so not 1 or 2 but 3 or 4 questions about the person just like when you call a phone bank service.
Anyways, the best way to really get security is with the secureid system, i have used and see its enormous advantage, the ID switches every so often, so even if you know the main password, you need the id to add the last part to concatenate to the rest. However, how many people log unto a website are able to have a system like that that can be verified other then companies giving their employees these. In this situation, I would say, make ticket sales phone based only. If this is something that is time sensitive and that in order to avoid one guy getting all the tickets based on a software that runs, then make it phone based only.
If you have a website ECommerce site, and it is used to sell products, the person logging to buy up all your products only makes you more money, but tickets is not in the same league as let's say buying a laptop or iphone off the internet. People are not too lazy that calling by phone will get them a secured ticket, but then again it would fall on ticketmaster to handle to cost of the phone lines...
which is something they want to avoid, unless they invest almost the same amount in R&D for a better system then what they got...either way, I guess I wont be going to see Metallica anytime soon.
monopolies, cartels, price gouging, barriers to entry, price fixing, etc...
these are the enemy of capitalism, not a part of capitalism. capitalism is the refinement of competition to achieve a maximum of efficiency. anticompetitive practices therefore have no place in natural capitalism. anticompetitive practices therefore are a greater threat to capitalism than communism
its illegal most everywhere robbery is also illegal, because its the same thing as robbery, but diffuse rather than specific
please educate yourself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticompetitive
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Except, as here, it can be done in advance. Once you can generate an ID of that image -- and that can mean simply a hash value of it -- you can store it in a database, and use it in that small window of oportunity when you need it.
Virtually every captcha I've seen applies a transformation or two of that image, from a small set of effects. So effectively you can end up with just one image for a given word, or a small finite set of distinct images. Add to that the fact that most use words from the dictionary, and the set of data you must store is actually very manageable.
Some transformations can even be filtered out before you hash, even if you don't automatically do an OCR on the word afterwards anyway. E.g., mixing colours can just mean you filter it to black and white before hashing, or theoretical more complex stuff (which I haven't seen actually used) can be defeated by contour tracing before you hash.
Once you have a way to get people to crack those for you, be it by reusing them for a "free" porn site or just paying some chinese kid a dollar an hour to crack captchas for you, you essentially just need some kind of caching to squeeze that information in the actual time window.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Scalping is a legitimate profession that serves a useful spot in the market. They provide convenience for customers, and help event ticket pricers determine what people are willing to pay. Not to mention the "scalpers" who are individuals trying to get their money back, for whatever reason - whether due to time conflict, or emergency financial situation, etc.
Or rather, scalping *would* be a legitimate profession, if people would embrace them, rather than try to shut them down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticompetitive
what the hell is wrong with you people?
this is pretty obvious basic simple economics here. is it really true that a lot people out there believe this anticompetitive bullshit is acceptable, even legal? do you not see the common sense basis for how this sort of practice destroys the marketplace, if you don't readily appreciate the simple illegality of the practice?
one would think all of this is obvious and simple conceptually
i find it hard to believe so many of you think this is fair or legal or acceptable on any moral, legal, or philosophical basis
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But isn't it similar to the success spammers have with spamming? If no one answered the spam emails they'd go out of business, and it's the same with the scalpers ... if you simply don't buy off them they will also go out of business!
That said, I don't see what's wrong with it and how you can make general scalping illegal and yet still permit Joe Schmo to sell a couple of spare gig tickets if some of his mates can't make it on the day?
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Sounds like capitalism to me. He's taking a risk by buying up all the flour. If he prices it over what people are willing to pay they won't buy it and he'll lose money. Some other smart business man will call his contact in the town over, buy up a bunch of flour there and sell it in this town for a 200% markup. He'll make a profit, undercut the 400% profit guy and put him out of business if he doesn't lower his prices. Some other smart business man will see the demand for flour booming and will buy up some high quality flour and sell it at an even higher price to folks who can afford, and desire, higher quality.
The original 2 guys make money, the 3 new guys make money. 4-5 other guys get jobs hauling flour. The other towns that make flour increase their sales. I like it.
MG
I'm really getting tired of this argument that scalpers don't cause any harm, as if driving up prices simply to create profit for a middleman never had any externalities.
Excuse me, but a piece of my tax money went to funding the creation of this stadium in our city. The point to building that stadium was to attract large acts and attractions to the city, making it a more enjoyable place to live. Now you're going to tell me that when those acts come to town, only the upper third of the city is going to be able to afford that concert. I guess it's great for them, but it's a raw deal for the rest of us.
There is a cultural concern for people. Ask an artist how he feels when his concert only goes 60% full because of unsold scalper tickets, and what effect that word of mouth about low-event concerts where the only audience members are the ones with the largest wallets. Does that have an effect on album sales, merchandise sales in the future? Ask your son what kind of cultural connection he has the local sports team - much worse the Yankees, or the Lakers - when he's never seen them play live, and likely never will since the ticket prices are so high. What effect does that have on the future sales of jerseys, on the number of people in the city that ignore the team altogether? No, really, honest question - what is the actual effect of inflated prices that don't go to benefit the team itself? Maybe the team did an economic study that showed that they make more money in the long run if prices are held to a certain level, provided scalping externalities don't come into play.
I'm gonna say something here that's going to get me modded -1 socialist, but what good does that extra ticket price do? It isn't going to benefit the artist or team directly. It won't provide upkeep for the stadium. It's paying someone else just for the privilege of saying that they'll put the tickets up on eBay for you. What do you think would happen if a city - instead of trying to outlaw scalping - enacted a scalping tax? When you sell a ticket, you owe 50% of your profit over the original resale price of the ticket. For the individual seller, this means that if you have tickets that you just want to get rid of, then you can sell them at original price without penalty. For the big name scalpers, it means that those sales at least go back into helping the city that helped to provide space for the attraction in the first place. Just a thought.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.