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."
Re:Capitalism at work (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly. Going through all that effort is a pretty clear demonstration they wanted the ticket more than other people who were not as highly motivated.
If the true market value is higher than the face value, then I think the right of first sale should apply. I should be able to buy something for $X, and sell it for $2X if the market will support it.
I think they just really liked springsteen (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Ebay it (Score:1, Interesting)
Shouldn't Springsteen and other artists try to maximize their profit? They could have people bid on individual seats or blocks of seats, with a certain reserve price per seat. At some point, the auction ends, and the tickets are awarded to the winning bidders. The remaining tickets could then be discounted or sold at the door.
Forcing people to pay market price for the seats would prevent the gap between supply and demand that scalpers exploit. It would also make artists and booking companies more money, and result in fewer grumpy fans -- sure, they might not get an awesome deal occasionally, but neither would they be prevented from attending a concert they wanted to attend in the seat they were willing to pay for.
Re:Capitalism at work (Score:3, Interesting)
They didn't even get them first.
They just got a lot of them early in the period of public availability.
Captcha solving is not against the law.
Their problem was the other stunts they pulled. But it wouldn't be much of a slash dot story if we couldn't tie in some technical method.
Re:Why is this a "scam"? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Your own network = botnet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hrm (Score:1, Interesting)
Bands could charge monopoly rents but don't for other reasons. The reason that the ticket prices are artificially low is the promoters/bands want sell-outs. It generates a better experience for those who attend, a sense of urgency to buy tickets early for future events, and makes venue owners happy (more parking and concessions). Who would want to see a band if you knew that the previous gigs only filled 1/2 the available seats? The only way that promoters can maximize profits is by auctioning all the tickets but, even this process may scare away sales.
The best way I could see to maximize profits is to offer all the tickets at a single price but reduce the price a small amount each day until show day (or sell-out). If you really want the best seats, you buy on the first day at an outrageous price. If your only willing to spend 10 bucks, you may strike-out. This also discourages scalping since all the people willing to spend more than the scalpers have already purchased their tickets. The best the scalpers can do is sell to people who are willing to buy tickets at the same price that the scalpers paid (or to those who weren't really honest to themselves about their true reservation price).
Re:Hrm (Score:2, Interesting)
Nothing is more demeaning to a performer than playing to an unenthusiastic audience. Jack up the prices too much and the front row will be filled with suits who give no vibe to the performers.
Re:Capitalism at work (Score:2, Interesting)
Online ticket sales are a failure. (Score:3, Interesting)
1. If event ticket sales are intended to sell tickets to those who actually intend to attend the event, then resales are contrary to the intent of the initial sale.
2. If event ticket sales are intended to provide the maximum revenue (or as close to it as can be in an uncertain market) to the initial seller, then resales should be conducted by the original seller, or the original seller should benefit by sharing a portion of the proceeds of resales.
3. If resales exist only to enrich scalpers (arbitrageurs by a more elegant word), then these scalpers add no value to the original seller.
4. When event tickets are available in a finite quanitity, there will most likely be more demand than supply.
5. In view of limited supply, there will always be some who want to attend the event, but will be unable to obtain tickets.
6. Online ticket sales are impossible to control to prevent arbitrage.
My point is that it is patently unfair to those of us who want to attend an event, but are unable to purchase tickets when the sales are only online, due to the maipulation of the market by automated arbitraguers. And these arbitrageurs (scalpers) add no value to the event organizers, promoters, performers, or exhibitors, but only increase costs for purchasers. In effect, they take what should have been additional revenue from the original seller, who either chose to accept a lower price or misjudged the market. Unfair? Actually, my complaint is that it's nearly impossible to buy a ticket to a concert unless you camp on the seller and hope you aren't just a moment off. Or got behind the bots who owned the site.
So, how to fix this?
Maybe put the purchaser's name on tickets, and require identification. Among other things, well, actually, counterfeit tickets are sometimes a problem also, who knows. But, bottom line is whether or not this a problem.
So is this a problem that needs to be solved? I say yes.
Another much better solution - auction off tickets. Yes, this will make tickets cost a LOT more, but it seems that there are people ready to pay more than the face value, so try driving out the scalpers by upping the price to what the market WILL bear, essentially pricing them out of the market. And then of course the buyers will be paying the scalper price right up front. Or will they?
Problem is, this doesn't really solve my problem. I won't be paying scalper prices for bad seats, and so I'm out again.
Actually, the problem is simply one of supply and demand. So I'll always just be hoping I got in line early enough to buy tickets. Alas, I may never get a ticket to a concert, just my dumb luck. Unless I buy scalped tickets early when they are a little cheaper (unlikely) or get lucky.
No fixing this. Screw it. Let the scalpers hose us. I bet some of them conspire with promoters and the 'legitimate' sellers anyways. Ticketmaster in particular is happy to screw us any way they can. All the rest ditto.
So there's no solution. Damn.
Re:Hrm (Score:4, Interesting)
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.