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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."
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.
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.