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Scalpers Bought Tickets With CAPTCHA-Busting Botnet
alphadogg writes "Three California men have pleaded guilty to charges they built a network of CAPTCHA-solving computers that flooded online ticket vendors and snatched up the very best seats for Bruce Springsteen concerts, Broadway productions and even TV tapings of Dancing with the Stars. The men ran a company called Wiseguy Tickets, and for years they had an inside track on some of the best seats in the house at many events. They scored about 1.5 million tickets after hiring Bulgarian programmers to build 'a nationwide network of computers that impersonated individual visitors' on websites such as Ticketmaster, MLB.com and LiveNation, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said Thursday in a press release. The network would 'flood vendors computers at the exact moment that event tickets went on sale,' the DoJ said. They had to create shell corporations, register hundreds of fake Internet domains (one was stupidcellphone.com) and sign up for thousands of bogus e-mail addresses to make the scam work."
What is so wrong?
It's no different than what guys like George Soros do...
You gotta hand it to them for being clever. How come there are no 'good' genius's only evil?
How is this any different than Ticketmaster scooping up all the good seats and auctioning them off on their own?
I'll never understand why "scalping" is illegal in the first place.
Nothing they did seems unethical or immoral to me.
If people are willing to pay more for a ticket, good for them.
The "good" genius works for the corporations. The "evil" ones are always the ones doing things the corporation does not like.
That would be at my local bar listening to.. uh I dunno.. Dire Straits on the jukebox..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I'm more inclined to think that the ticket prices were set too low to begin if these scalpers are able to find buyers at higher prices. Personally, I'll just watch (or not watch) the stuff on TV.
Because they are evil if you cannot understand them...
I think I could spend 2 years in min security prison for 5-10 mil and be happy about it.
Still a pretty good idea they should open a franchise.
Prices are already screwed to hell for these events. I say good for them sorry they got caught.
If they were smart they would have lived in a different country.
I'm just curious but they had to have some serious start up money.
Were they using stolen CC#'s or did they just have countless credit cards?
You would think this would be pretty easy to track down the bank accounts that they use.
Collect who's paying for what and go from there.
No, that's not correct either.
The "good" genius works for the corporations. The "evil" genius controls the corporations.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Bush administration: Defends corporate interests and their "right" to lock down on a market for maximum profit at the expense of the consumer.
Obama administration: Defends corporate interests and their "right" to lock down on a market for maximum profit at the expense of the consumer.
Holy shit, that is a profound change. I understand know why the people on the extreme right are up in arms over all this socialism.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It is *exactly* like what guys like George Soros and many, many others do...the "wiseguys" decided to create their own unfair advantage without paying off politicians first, though...that just won't do.
I used to fear clowns...but I'm discovering that chimps are far, far, worse.
Shouldn't Springsteen and other artists try to maximize their profit? They could have people bid on individual seats or blocks of seats, with a certain reserve price per seat. At some point, the auction ends, and the tickets are awarded to the winning bidders. The remaining tickets could then be discounted or sold at the door.
Forcing people to pay market price for the seats would prevent the gap between supply and demand that scalpers exploit. It would also make artists and booking companies more money, and result in fewer grumpy fans -- sure, they might not get an awesome deal occasionally, but neither would they be prevented from attending a concert they wanted to attend in the seat they were willing to pay for.
CAPTCHA security - more worthless by the day (23 July 2008)
The article suggests using the Quantum Random Bit Generator Service sign-up approach; you do know your maths through at least calculus ... right?
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
I agree with the gp. Why not let the free market take care of this?
If people are willing to pay the scalpers' prices, then that means the original ticket prices were not high enough.
If they are NOT willing to pay the scalpers' prices, then the scalpers will be stuck with a bunch of tickets they cant sell.
Never mind that only the rich will be able to afford Springsteen tickets at the jacked-up prices. Who cares?
Set a "release date" for initial ticket sales
Everyone registers before hand that they want a ticket
There is either a lottery, or high offer gets best ticket.
You could set a minimum price and all extra tickets sell for that after the release date.
Such a better system for high-demand events.
Language like "hacking" and "scalping" tend to hide the actual crime here.
The ticket purchase/sale is a contract, unlike some of the online transactions that people assume are contracts but are not. (There is a mutual agreement to terms, and consideration is exchanged for something of value.) The people who bought the tickets represented a fictitious identity while entering into a contract. This is a crime of fraud (not "hacking") and because of the electronic nature of the transaction and the intent, it constitute wire fraud.
What I'm wondering is what the threat was that persuaded them to plead guilty.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
What's the difference between this and High Frequency Trading? In both cases you're using very fast computers to give you an edge over normal people in buying items that you will then sell a short time later for a higher price to people willing to buy them.
In the grand scheme of things, having to sit 20 rows back instead of 2 is not a big deal. Yea, it offends my self-righteous indignation, but it's not life or death. I don't think prison time is fair for people gaming the system. Our systems are designed for gaming. Our elected officials do it for a living, and what's the punishment? "Censure". On the other hand, I wouldn't protest if the perps were all separated from their reproductive organs by a crazed weasel. I would scalp tickets to that show.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
You know, CAPTCHA always gave me two words to type: one they already knew and one that not even they could figure out. I could always type the one word perfectly and the other word they asked me to type is where I can get creative and write anything I wanted and they'll accept it thankfully as though I am their OCR scanner helping Google Books scan a document before making it available on their public domain repository.
After the recent news, that second word I've been typing for CAPTCHA to unconditionally accept has been either
NIGGER or CRACKER or KIKE or LIMEY SPIC or JEW or WHIGGER or MOLATTO. What the hell is wrong with CAPTCHA and why is it asking me to write all these racist words?
It's like CAPTCHA is trying to use the police-arrest Script of two African Americans arguing on a Day-time TV show. Get me out of here, get rid of CAPTCHA please.
Something is for sale, they bought it. Isn't that how it works in capitalism?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The 'botnet' these articles are talking about are their own dedicated servers, not virus infections like they are trying to imply. You don't need a botnet to crack captchas, you can use a server to queue up 1000's of captcha images and have third world workers solve them for a tenth of a cent. This entire case is basically just explaining someones business and then inserting and replacing words with ones that have bad connotations to get the public to think that they have solved a crime. Just replace the words 'computer network' with 'botnet', 'revenue' with 'ill-gotten gains', sending a web request with 'impersonating users', and throw in the words fraud, hacking, scheme, and bogus every other word and you can make anything look like organized crime.
They used a bot net to circumvent maximum ticket policies under assumed names ect , thereby commiting fraud on the ticket company. They also used automated means to purchase tickets from a system that is meant to take individual orders on a first come first serve basis.. again fraud. they then turned around and used those fraudulently obtained tickets to resell (tickets they fraudulently recieved) to unsuspecting buyers at an inflated price which they could set because they bought all the tickets fraudulenty. now.. if you can't see what is wrong here.. you've got some issues. Its a straight contract violation, fraud and unjust enrichment case..
As ohers have previously said, the problem here is that the tickets prices were not high enough (in a free market sense).
The solution would be to sell the tickets at the right price, that is, the price consumers are willing to pay.
I think a system like this would do the job
1. The day tickets go on sale, charge an outrageous amount (say, $100,000).
2. Then gradually decrease prices each day (or even every hour)
3. Last day the tickets would go on sale for $1
In that way, each person would decide which is the "right" price to pay. Do you *really* want to see this show? Would you risk missing it because you want to save a few bucks and wait until tomorrow? Do you think it would be a good deal to buy tickets now and resell them later for a profit? OK go ahead. How many tickets? At which price? Are you sure you will be able to sell them, considering that people willing to pay a higher price already had the opportunity to do so and refused?
If they'd just put that much time and effort into a legitimate operation they'd probably still have made millions and wouldn't be facing jail time.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
So what you're saying is you don't mind living in a society in which the richest few people get the best of everything, because that's what would happen. There's a reason why the front rows at NBA games are filled with celebrities, or why most season tickets sold by sports franchises are purchased by corporations (who claim them for tax write-offs). Common folk like me would be priced out of ever seeing a popular show, just like many common folk are priced out of getting, say, good health care. You may believe that capitalism is fair for everyone, but from my point of view it simply funnels wealth and privilege to a tiny fraction of society. I see no value added to society by scalpers. They benefit only themselves by systematically inflating the price of tickets for everyone else.
They paid for tickets, right?
1. If event ticket sales are intended to sell tickets to those who actually intend to attend the event, then resales are contrary to the intent of the initial sale.
2. If event ticket sales are intended to provide the maximum revenue (or as close to it as can be in an uncertain market) to the initial seller, then resales should be conducted by the original seller, or the original seller should benefit by sharing a portion of the proceeds of resales.
3. If resales exist only to enrich scalpers (arbitrageurs by a more elegant word), then these scalpers add no value to the original seller.
4. When event tickets are available in a finite quanitity, there will most likely be more demand than supply.
5. In view of limited supply, there will always be some who want to attend the event, but will be unable to obtain tickets.
6. Online ticket sales are impossible to control to prevent arbitrage.
My point is that it is patently unfair to those of us who want to attend an event, but are unable to purchase tickets when the sales are only online, due to the maipulation of the market by automated arbitraguers. And these arbitrageurs (scalpers) add no value to the event organizers, promoters, performers, or exhibitors, but only increase costs for purchasers. In effect, they take what should have been additional revenue from the original seller, who either chose to accept a lower price or misjudged the market. Unfair? Actually, my complaint is that it's nearly impossible to buy a ticket to a concert unless you camp on the seller and hope you aren't just a moment off. Or got behind the bots who owned the site.
So, how to fix this?
Maybe put the purchaser's name on tickets, and require identification. Among other things, well, actually, counterfeit tickets are sometimes a problem also, who knows. But, bottom line is whether or not this a problem.
So is this a problem that needs to be solved? I say yes.
Another much better solution - auction off tickets. Yes, this will make tickets cost a LOT more, but it seems that there are people ready to pay more than the face value, so try driving out the scalpers by upping the price to what the market WILL bear, essentially pricing them out of the market. And then of course the buyers will be paying the scalper price right up front. Or will they?
Problem is, this doesn't really solve my problem. I won't be paying scalper prices for bad seats, and so I'm out again.
Actually, the problem is simply one of supply and demand. So I'll always just be hoping I got in line early enough to buy tickets. Alas, I may never get a ticket to a concert, just my dumb luck. Unless I buy scalped tickets early when they are a little cheaper (unlikely) or get lucky.
No fixing this. Screw it. Let the scalpers hose us. I bet some of them conspire with promoters and the 'legitimate' sellers anyways. Ticketmaster in particular is happy to screw us any way they can. All the rest ditto.
So there's no solution. Damn.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If I require you to agree to a certain terms before I will sell you a ticket, and you break those terms, then you have broken the contract you have made with me. So now we are are having the government step in and tell people that they cannot sell their services under their own terms? :)
The performers aren't indentured servants, they should have say in who they want to perform for. If they want to perform for just their friends they should be allowed to. If they want to perform for highest bidder they can do that too. It is their choice (within reason), and it doesn't require any government intervention beyond the normal enforcing of contracts. Without knowing the details of the case, it is hard to know whether the hacking charges are valid, but given the scope of the operation I think that treating it as criminal fraud rather than just a civil case isn't unreasonable.
...by all the "legal" scalpers that control the market, Ticketmaster, Live Nation, etc. Great acts in small clubs where you can pay directly are where it's at.
You cannot violate the laws of economics any more than you can violate the law of gravity. It does not matter what the intent of the original seller is. For example, let's say that the garage band down the street wanted to sell futures against their eventual fame. You could buy future tickets for concerts not yet booked (like a voucher) at a huge discount compared to their eventual list price. This is good to both you and the band. So, when the concert day eventually comes (you pick the day), you'll be able to redeem your voucher. Is this fair to those who did not buy a futures contract and had to buy at list price? Probably, but they took no risks. Had the band flops, the paper you bought would have been worthless. Indeed the risks are so high, I doubt any garage band could sell futures. Now, the band would have to buy their own tickets as a hedge against the redeeming of the contracts by the futures holders, so the initial cash they received would have probably have a negative rate of return as a cash value, but they could have invested that money in equipment and touring costs, etc. (when they would otherwise have no cash), and this would have probably have been a great investment.
Now, there are all kinds of ways that the concert could be unfair. For example, the concert could be sold out, could be canceled, could have a lousy performance, could have no good seats. In other words, you could end up not being able to go, or not enjoying the event, but both are equivalent because you are purchasing the entertainment value of the event, and there are many ways that can go way down.
If you have to struggle to invent some sort of ethical or moral claim to press against the scalpers, then you are probably going to overreach. The same claim can then be made against any middleman. Why aren't there middlemen buying up all the CDs of a particular band and then charging more for them? It's because there is no discount in CD prices to begin with, and there are many alternative markets. However, you'd be pretty upset if you could not sell your CD collection at a flea market. Yet, by doing so, you are scalper too, just not a very good one.
1) Sell tickets ONLY via credit/debit cards. This gives the seller the ability to track a purchase to an individual.
2) Require identification at the venue when the purchaser arrives. At point of entry, the venue gives the purchaser a unique UUID on a slip of paper along with a separate receipt that proves the purchaser has received this UUID.
3) The UUID is submitted back to the seller, who records it with the purchaser's original purchase invoice.
4) The purchaser MUST, within a fixed period (say, 3 business days) callback to the seller (via phone, internet, etc.) with this UUID.
5) If the purchase fails to fulfill step 3), purchase is charged $1000 USD to their account (remember, they gave their credit/debit card info to seller).
This would make scalpers unable to do any reselling.. the scalper would be on the hook for the failure-to-callback charge, which would far outweigh the profit from a raised ticket resell price.
Picture it as if the scalper is a MITM listener 'Mallory' who 'eavesdrops' on the seller 'Alice' and purchase 'Bob'. The UUID, given by the venue, is a third piece of information, given via a secure out-of-band channel, to 'Alice' and 'Bob', so that 'Mallory' cannot possibly authenticate themselves to the seller 'Alice'. So if their own money is on the line, they are out of luck.
Surely someone must have come up with this idea before? Otherwise, I hereby dub it ArghBlarg's ScalperKiller(tm). Patent pending. :p
With limited quantities (tickets, discounted items, etc) you have to put limits/rules in place or the only people buying them are those that want to profit off it.
Having just purchased my first house, I saw this quite a bit in real estate. My wife and I have decent jobs and plenty of free time for projects, so we wanted to get a house that needed a little TLC for a lower price and fix it up ourselves. The problem is that "investors" and fix-and-flip types could, and would, swoop in and snatch these houses up before people who would actually live in them could. Then two months later the houses are back on the market at double the price (and the "upgrades" are of dubious quality, anyway). These "investors" often buy the houses outright with cash, so their offer looks the best when compared with a young couple's financed offer.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Serious question. It sounds like these guys put a lot of effort and financial resources into this. It seems as if they were using their own equipment (NOT A BOTNET!!!) and there's no indication in the article that they were using stolen credit cards or other stolen funds to pay for the ticket purchases. Didn't it occur to any of them at any point in cooking up this plan that they could start a legitimate business with the same amount of work and they'd never have to worry about getting caught.
For years now I have been trying to go see a certain artist perform. Only to find the only tickets available ... moments after scheduled release, was at the shady reseller sites. I've always refused to pay 5x the face value or even 2x face value. Especially when it is blatant fraud on the part of the re-sellers.
Hopefully the DOJ hems them up in prison for a very very long time indeed. Say, one day for every ticket they snatched up .. or one day for every dollar they made. Or just take them out back and shoot them. They deserve it.
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
I realize that the artists and the venue want to offer reasonably priced tickets to consumers directly at below market price, but there will always be a-holes that will buy up all those tickets and then sell them to the market-driven price. The problem here is that it's fundamentally impossible to sell something below market price because someone will buy it up and resell it at market price unless you have very tight entry controls. For example, they might try to sell these tickets like airline tickets and make them non-transferable. That means every ticket purchased will only be valid for someone if their ID (with some strong crypto signatures) matches the credit card used to buy the ticket. Of course this is quite difficult to pull off. Short of that type of gate authorization system tied to the purchaser, they should just offer it up to the highest bidder. That way the bidder can at least be sure that they're getting real tickets and not some fake copy of a first-row seat. Believe it or not, there are plenty of scalpers who make a living selling fake tickets.
There was an Iron Maiden concert near here last summer, people were camped out two days before it to get good seats. I'm sure those are the people the band want in the front row, not a bunch of suits (or even empty seats if the suits find something better to do).
No sig today...
They did not defraud ticketmaster, they were defrauding the people buying the tickets.
A t the simplest level, because they bought tickets in a manner that was in breach of the terms of service of the ticket company this means that the tickets were technically invalid. People who purchased said tainted tickets could be refused entry based on the fact that, when they were originally bought from the original vendor they were obtained in a manner not in compliance with the terms of service.
What does this mean?
It means that they were knowingly sold on in bad faith to a third party when they were technically not worth the paper they were printed on. This is the fraudulent action, and they knew it. The price at which they sold the tickets on is actually irrelevant.
"The performers aren't indentured servants, they should have say in who they want to perform for." ;-)
You are clearly not too familiar with the music industry
addresses?
Say what? Why would you sign up for e-mails, when you've registered hundreds of Internet domains? I have one domain and could generate thousands of working e-mail addresses
/etc/aliases
in a few keystrokes:
$ clisp -x '(loop for x below 10000 do (format t "~a: kaz~%" (gensym)))' >
What is a bogus e-mail, anyway? If they use it as a real end-point for receiving a ticket purchase confirmation, then it's a real e-mail address.
A bogus e-mail address is one which cannot be used to send anything to whoever provided the e-mail address. You don't "sign up" for a bogus e-mail address; you randomly generate it. E.g: "asdf@xyzzy.com".
What crime occurred here? Fake emails and shell companies aren't exactly moral, but last i heard are legal as long as you aren't using them to defraud the taxman or something.
Unless they were using viruses to 'recruit' horsepower i don't see any legal issue here.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Scalping should never be illegal since it is just free enterprise.
But it should be fair game to try to put in place mechanisms to prevent it. Airlines do it by binding tickets to identities.
Here is another idea a: deposit system tied to credit cards.
Suppose cheap tickets are available online for $15 so that important fans (like kids who can't afford pricey tickets) could see a young band. You want these fans to be able to go to the concert because one day they will have good jobs and support the old band.
A deposit system could discourage the scalping of cheap tickets.
To get an early seat for $15, you have to put down, say, $215. When you show up to the concert, you get $200 back.
What can a scalper do now? He has to take the risk of buying a $215 ticket, which may not sell. Come close to show time, he's holding something he paid $215 for. To merely break even, someone has to hand him a wad of cash totalling $215.
That person, in turn, will only hand him $215 if he believes that he can get most of that money back (i.e. recover the $200) deposit. But it will be made very clear to everyone that refunds will be performed strictly by crediting the original card, never in cash! So basically, the scalper has to convince some suckers at the door that the ticket is worth >= $215.
A tightly regulated procedure can be put in place to refund the deposits to ticket holders who were unable to make the show. They would have to go somewhere in person and present the ticket, the credit card which matches the ticket, and picture ID. (If it's daddy's credit card, daddy has to go there).
Refunds to those attending concerts could be done in the absence of the credit card being presented. This opens the possibility that a scalper sells a ticket for $15, and can get the refund when the ticket is used. However, if the ticket is not used, he has to go through the above system to try to recover the deposit. Moreover, the limitations on number of tickets per credit card would have to be defeated somehow. For instance, the scalper would have to use some online banking website to generate one-time-use credit card numbers, so he can use a unique one for each ticket. Such credit card numbers could be refused in the post-concert refund system (where you have to present the actual plastic card with the number).
Another way to fight the scalpers would be for the issuer to make phony purchase requests to the scalpers. Buy those cheap tickets from the scalpers, and then put those tickets into a "do not refund" database.
The real problem here is that these types of people add ZERO value to society. Scalpers, domain name squatters, high frequency traders, etc.. intercept transactions that were going to happen anyway, and funnel money out of an already functioning system. They should be punished and deterred. Put these entrepreneurs to work doing something useful instead.
Most concerts etc I've been to have doors sales up towards the last minute. If there are unsold tickets, they'll be available at the door. No need for scalpers at all.
Sounds more like a "server farm" than a botnet to me...