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."