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."

Comments

Re:Hrm

[DarkOx]

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.

No you don't need to put limits. Ticket scalping happens because the market is demonstrating that tickets are under priced. If someone buys all the tickets up as you say and than tries to sell them there is a maximum price at which he can expect to move the units. This is the price people are willing to pay to see the show. Lets say I purchase all the $15 dollar tickets to see my favorite band. They are not harmed, they sold their entire inventory of tickets at a price they were willing to offer the service of performing for; I might be able to sell those tickets at $20 each and make a tidy profit. If I try and sell them a $80 each most of them probably won't sell and I will lose my shirt because the self life of the inventory is right up until the show starts and after that its all worthless.

Now if they want to stop ticket scalping the band should simply charge more. If they raise the price to the maximum they can expect to move all the inventory at lets say its $20, than I while I can still buy them all I wont because I can't even resell them all for $21.

Really hot shows just need to up their prices. The performers would make more money and the ticket vendor sites would not get DDOSed, with 1000s of requests in the first moments of sale.

Re:Capitalism at work

[ovirto]

Your assumption is that if this is based on capitalism, there must be nothing wrong with it. I'm not exactly sure that's a good assumption. Take the recent credit derivatives debacle that threw our economy into a tailspin. Hey, Goldman Sachs and others created a product, people were willing to buy a product at a certain price. There's a risk element just like there is with any other security. That's capitalism, what's wrong with that? i think history demonstrates that, while based on capitalism, how unhealthy this activity was to our economy. As far as tickets go, let's say these tickets were priced at value that both the promoter and the artist agreed would be fair compensation. Their goal being to make some money for the work they produce while at the same time, setting the price in a range that allows a broad base of fans to enjoy. Scalpers come in, buy up the majority of the tickets and resell them at double the value. Sure, that's capitalism. But that act may have effectively shut out a large fan base that can't afford that new price. What's wrong with that? Well, from a market perspective, nothing (perhaps). It's supply and demand. But from a societal perspective, it starts to put a bigger wedge between the haves and have-nots. Entertainment/Sports/etc. becomes a industry that can be enjoyed only if you have a certain amount of wealth. In the long run, that may not be beneficial to that industry as the fan base drops. Keep in mind that the industry itself had set a price in order to maintain/increase fan base. It was the act of a third party that may have priced out a potential consumers.

Re:Capitalism at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitalism: The new religion of the 21st and 22nd century. Like all religions, dare ye not question it! For God is in the numbers. Everything has a price - everything must go! Sell your soul for a buck, you won't need where we're going. The only rule is that money rules all. Dig in, pig out, eat not your fill but everything you can take. Fuck your neighbours, what's yours is yours and what's theirs should be yours too! For the free market is divine and it commands that the only true virtue is greed. So pile on, like rats atop a sinking ship, for he who can reach the highest will eventually touch the sun, and be made supreme!
Welcome to paradise, don't mind the mess.

Someone stop the planet, I want off.

Re:Capitalism at work

[DarkOx]

Goldman Sachs and others created a product, people were willing to buy a product at a certain price. There's a risk element just like there is with any other security. That's capitalism, what's wrong with that?

There is nothing wrong with that but those MBS and other derivatives were marketed as being less risky than lots of those guys knew they in fact were. There is nothing wrong with derivatives, the problem had to do with FRAUD up and down the line. People applying for loans gave fraudulent information to brokers, brokers fraudulently modified the applications farther or simply passed on the documents as vetted without doing it. Banks wrote the loans and then sold them to other banks fraudulently claiming their application processes were secure when they were knowingly doing nothing to verify what brokers will telling them. Those other banks lumped those loans into baskets of vary quality claiming that it was diversification and reduced risk. The trouble was because of all the FRAUD up and down the line many many more of the loans in those baskets of high quality mortgages were actually low quality. Knowing this they marketed the securities any way FRAUDULENTLY insisting they were safe. Then people bought insure on the investment which by this point many of these investors might not have know there were problems but many still did know and in those cases the FRAUDULENTLY characterized the risk the the insurer who went with it because they wanted to have the business to show their investors. The insurers probably knew what was going on as well but because of all the other FRAUD they were able to claim most of their exposure was only to high quality assets and push up their stock prices that way. Then because people had the insurance which was to affordable they used more leverage than they otherwise would buy more of the same FRAUD laden crap and repeated the process until it was unsustainable.

So the problem was not capitalism, but FRAUD and sadly none of the solutions actually involved prosecuting anyone from FRAUD.