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

I think they just really liked springsteen

[Rivalz]

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.

Re:Why is this a "scam"?

[DarkOx]

Actually really big money men like Soros pay top dollar to have the fastest connections into the systems that run the exchanges. They also have computer systems running what ever algorithm they think will make a money that day sitting on their side of those connections waiting to pounce. Ever try to get in on a hot IPO as retail investor? You can't, ever try to unload something during a major sell off and wonder why it takes hours when the trade to buy it took seconds (sure some of that might be there are no buyers but..)? Most of this is because you at the back of the line when it comes to placing orders and people like Soros are up front.

High Frequency Trading

[Taur0]

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.

Your own network = botnet?

[xboxilve]

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.

Re:Hrm

[hey!]

Well, I am certainly sympathetic to the argument that if the concert promoter sets the price of tickets wrong by making it too low, it's not necessarily *dishonest* for some third party to make a few bucks at arbitrage. Still, there's a few wrinkles in this scenario worth considering.

First, what are you buying when you buy a ticket, a piece of paper? No. You are buying the right to attend an event. *If* the providers of that event stipulate that the right being sold is not transferable unless it is given away or the purchaser was acting as an agent for the planned attendee when he bought the ticket, then what has the purchaser bought from the scalper? A piece of paper. He *cannot* buy the right to attend the event because that right is not transferable. The scalper is encouraging the purchaser to attend the event fraudulently.

Of course, you might say, "no harm, no foul." That's a different ethical approach, more utilitarian and less legalistic. Well, it's not necessarily the case that there is no harm. The economic relationship between the performer and the audience does not begin and end at the ticket price. There's merchandise sales, for example. The economically optimal price for the ticket, all things being equal, might result in fewer attendees, reducing merchandise sales and future sales of recordings and tickets. Some performers may not like playing to venues with many empty seats, and choose to the avoid larger venues. That harms the venue's owners.

I believe if the performers and concert promoters are amenable to reselling tickets that's a *different* story; but if tickets are on sale at less than the price which maximizes gross revenue, that doesn't necessarily mean the price has been set too low.