Scalpers Bought Tickets With CAPTCHA-Busting Botnet 301
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."
Buzzwords cloud the issue (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Informative)
Problem is, the band wants all 100 seats in the venue to be filled. The scalpers don't give a shit if they sell all the tickets they bought, as long as they sell enough of them to profit. Buying all 100 tickets for $10 each and marking up the price to $100 each means they can sell 20 to the people who REALLY want to go (because the only way to get tickets is for $100, and everyone else who has any interest in the matter other than the money is screwed. The people who manage to get tickets are screwed because they're at a show that's at 1/5 capacity. The people who didn't go because of the wildly inflated price (that clearly the market bore) is out of their range. The band has a mediocre show at 1/5 capacity, which means 1/5 as many people going out and telling their friends how awesome it was and that they should buy the band's album and merch.
This is part of why they don't "just raise prices". There's more than one factor involved here. But don't let that get in the way of the typical Slashdot-style "I understand one component of the problem a little bit so I have the obvious solution" commentary.
My captcha: "raving". Of course.
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Informative)
You must never buy tickets from reseller sites. If the scalpers over purchase (and they often do) you can buy the tickets REALLY cheap right before the game/show. If you wait to the last second, you can often find them for 1/5th the list price.
Re:Capitalism at work (Score:4, Informative)
The price is based on fraudulent pretenses. If a show is sold out because of scalpers fraudulently acquiring tickets, the only realistic option a fan has to see the show is to pay a price that has been inflated because of that fraudulent activity.
This isn't simply a matter of price speculation, it's market manipulation done in bad faith.