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 !
$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
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 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 ,,,,
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.
understand the illegality yet?
Nope.. if the townspeople simply refuse to buy the flour at that price (either doing without flour for the week or buying from a different location), the asshole is down $40. If people know that most of what they're paying is pure profit and yet still pay the price, they're simply idiots. This is exactly how a free market is supposed to work.
which is totally what she said
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.
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
It's not a form of robbery, it's what happens in a free market, and if people don't buy the food (seriously, you think they'll starve after a week? I don't know how long flour lasts though). Unless it's happening all over the board then they can get other forms of food. If they all die then the scalpers would lose all their customers anyway, so they'll bring their prices down until most people can actually afford it. Yes, some people will still not be able to afford it, but that's how these things work in non socialist countries. Otherwise by your reasoning anyone that ever makes a profit is simply a robber and a parasite. In this case the scalper doesn't really add any value, but what he is doing is not illegal, and the townsfolk can also go to a different source, unless they guy has some kind of monopoly (which is in fact illegal).
which is totally what she said
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