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."
Hrm (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing they did seems unethical or immoral to me.
If people are willing to pay more for a ticket, good for them.
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, what stops you, as a scalper, from buying out every ticket you possibly can through whatever means necessary, and then jack the prices up?
A. Less people buy the tickets and you make less money.
B. Far less people buy the tickets and you lose money.
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.
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Insightful)
With limited quantities (tickets, discounted items, etc) you have to put limits/rules in place or the only people buying them are those that want to profit off it.
No you don't need to put limits. Ticket scalping happens because the market is demonstrating that tickets are under priced. If someone buys all the tickets up as you say and than tries to sell them there is a maximum price at which he can expect to move the units. This is the price people are willing to pay to see the show. Lets say I purchase all the $15 dollar tickets to see my favorite band. They are not harmed, they sold their entire inventory of tickets at a price they were willing to offer the service of performing for; I might be able to sell those tickets at $20 each and make a tidy profit. If I try and sell them a $80 each most of them probably won't sell and I will lose my shirt because the self life of the inventory is right up until the show starts and after that its all worthless.
Now if they want to stop ticket scalping the band should simply charge more. If they raise the price to the maximum they can expect to move all the inventory at lets say its $20, than I while I can still buy them all I wont because I can't even resell them all for $21.
Really hot shows just need to up their prices. The performers would make more money and the ticket vendor sites would not get DDOSed, with 1000s of requests in the first moments of sale.
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Insightful)
They are not harmed, they sold their entire inventory of tickets at a price they were willing to offer the service of performing for
The second part of this sentence doesn't imply the first. To throw out a hypothesis, it might be that the tickets were deliberately priced below what the market would bear because the aim was not solely to turn a profit on the concert but also to attract lots of impressionable teenagers who might then become life-long fans and spend more on the band over their lifetime than the yuppie who is prepared to pay more for the ticket.
(Actually the biggest example which comes to mind of deliberate underpricing is the BBC Promenade series, and in particular the Last Night. If there were an open market in Last Night of the Proms tickets they'd probably sell for 100 GBP or more, but by making some tickets available to people who queue in person on the day they are able to achieve the aim of making it an event which pretty much anyone near enough London can attend).
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:Hrm (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, there's just the matter of not wanting to deal with profiteering jerks. My neighborhood held a community garage sale this morning. I hadn't done any spring cleaning in like 5 years so I had a ton of stuff to put out, bright and early when the event started at 8AM. At 7AM I've got ebay treasure hunters driving by screaming at me "got laptops?!? got jewelry!?!" People who just scout garage sales looking for underpriced stuff they can ebay. I didn't want to sell anything to those assholes. If I had something cheap, I wanted it to go to the poor as crap people who wandered in at 10am because they actually needed hand-me-down clothes and toys for their kids.
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Re:Hrm (Score:5, Insightful)
Ticket scalping happens because the market is demonstrating that tickets are under priced. If someone buys all the tickets up as you say and than tries to sell them there is a maximum price at which he can expect to move the units. This is the price people are willing to pay to see the show. Lets say I purchase all the $15 dollar tickets to see my favorite band. They are not harmed, they sold their entire inventory of tickets at a price they were willing to offer the service of performing for;
Unless, of course, there is an intangible benefit to the band of having people in the audience that cannot afford to pay more than $15 per ticket, but can afford to spend the time it takes to purchase them the moment they go on sale (after closely following the band's announcements to find out exactly when that will be).
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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.
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No, we're having the government step in to prevent people from misrepresenting who they are. Scalpers in this case pretended to be individuals buying the tickets, but instead they bought them wholesale with the intention of cornering the market for desirable seats. free market can only exist if both the seller and the buyer have perfect information about the product and the people involved. Scalpers in this case changed that.
They broke a contract (Score:2)
If I require you to agree to a certain terms before I will sell you a ticket, and you break those terms, then you have broken the contract you have made with me. So now we are are having the government step in and tell people that they cannot sell their services under their own terms? :)
The performers aren't indentured servants, they should have say in who they want to perform for. If they want to perform for just their friends they should be allowed to. If they want to perform for highest bidder they can d
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So now we are having the government step in and tell people what they can and cannot buy based on a possible intangible benefit to the band?
Having those $15 tickets available benefits society. Bands having passionate fans is good for society. Having cultural activities available to those who don't have a lot of money benefits society. The band wants to do this, but they can't enforce the rules by themselves.
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean (eg.) by actually being fans, knowing the music and cheering when you play the opening chord?
Scalping take the tickets out of their hands and puts them in the hands of the idle rich who only go because they've got nothing better to do or are trying to impress somebody else who doesn't really want to be there either.
The band should be the setting setting the prices and getting the profits, not some scumbags. They're the ones doing the work...
Re:Hrm (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoa, that's brilliant! How about you call up the record industry executives to suggest they do just this! Obviously, none of them has ever thought "DUH, how about if WE jack up the prices?!?!?".
Or it might just be that you're not looking at the whole picture and the only value of your analysis is that it demonstrates how a generally valid theory leads to woefully wrong conclusions if boundary conditions aren't taken into account.
Rich vs. Poor (Score:2)
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Taking this a little further, perhaps there would be *more* shows -- just not more by your favorite band, but rather more bands. Money would be available for more venues, etc..
In economic terms there would be more money available to the promoters of shows, concerts, etc., so they would increase capacity, instead of the extra funds either not being available or being siphoned off by the scalpers. By underpricing the tickets, promoters tend to prevent competition.
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Insightful)
The bands realize that if they price concerts out of the reach of all but a small percentage of their fans, they may eventually have no fans.
In addition, a band gets a lot of cred when the concert is sold out. It feeds the hype machine. If the tickets are instead priced at the optimal economic point, the concert will not sell out. The word on the street is then that the band over-estimated itself, especially if they do more than one night and both nights fail to sell out.
Some concerts are sold at lower prices out of a sense of gratitude to the fanbase. It's really ugly when a greedy bastard then snaps them all up and sells them for a huge markup.
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Just a thought - how about pricing tickets the same way Google priced their IPO?
Dutch auction. Basically you have a large number of (tickets, stock - whatever) and you put them up for public auction. For each set of identical items, say there are 50 seats that are roughly the same 'value' - the top 50 bidders get the tickets at whatever price the 50th bid was - so you can bid astronomically high to insure you get a seat, but the seat prices are actually priced so everybody pays the same (the lowest still
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If the event is under priced then I see nothing wrong with "buying out every ticket you possibly can through whatever means necessary, and then jack the prices up".
If the event is over priced or priced just at what the market thinks is fair, then the scalper gets creamed.
Nobody can afford to buy ALL the tickets, or even ALL the best tickets, and venues have the option of limiting purchases of large blocks of tickets to specific sized and delayed periods of availability to preserve an equal chance for indivi
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Actually, the size of a purchase IS limited explicitly to prevent scalper buying up blocks. The whole crux of TFA is that these scalpers used a botnet to defeat the captcha specifically so they could bypass the maximum per-person restriction.
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The problem is, what stops you, as a scalper, from buying out every ticket you possibly can through whatever means necessary, and then jack the prices up?
I'll tell you what. It's called The Market.
If you buy too many tickets, you won't be able to sell them. You might not make money, and you might even lose money. If you you want to accept this transfer of risk, go ahead.
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Sucks to be you. What should happen is the ticket originator should jack their price up until the scalpers profit margins no longer make it worthwhile. There are several means to do this that don't require some jack booted thug to get involved.
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Unfortunately, when I was in Chicago I never saw anything except tickets being available from "brokers" and people that somehow thought they needed to stand in line at 3:00 AM to try to get tickets. The brokers always had a service charge which would jump the face value of the ticket 2 or 3 times but you always knew you could get the tickets without standing in line at 3:00 AM.
I don't believe there is a practical way to get event tickets other than from broker these days. And these folks are just as bad a
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I don't believe there is a practical way to get event tickets other than from broker these days.
There's this little thing I use.
You might have heard about it.
It's called the Internet.
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But nothing turns fans off more than finding out the shows sold out and having to buy tickets off thugs outside the venue.
Since the only other option is buying them from the venue-approved thugs (ticketmaster or livenation), I'm not very sympathetic to your point.
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Not even buying up all available tickets and reselling them at a markup? Inflating the prices to astronomical levels?
Capitalism at work. Legal? Sure should be, in a pure capitalist system, but ethical? Oh hell no.
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Ticketmaster probably doesn't care, though. I've long thought that Ticketmaster probably likes scalpers, because it shifts the risk of not selling out from them to the scalpers. If they wanted to stop it, they would do it by requiring one cr
very best seats for Bruce Springsteen concerts (Score:2, Insightful)
That would be at my local bar listening to.. uh I dunno.. Dire Straits on the jukebox..
I guess it's a scam (Score:2)
I'm more inclined to think that the ticket prices were set too low to begin if these scalpers are able to find buyers at higher prices. Personally, I'll just watch (or not watch) the stuff on TV.
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.
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Prepaid Visa / Mastercards or a card that will give you "one time use" numbers would be two simple ways to sidestep the "follow the money" investigation.
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Prepaid Visa / Mastercards or a card that will give you "one time use" numbers would be two simple ways to sidestep the "follow the money" investigation.
Almost certainly not. Law enforcement can easily ask the credit card company for details and it all points back to the master account. However this could make casual database searching a bit tougher, using this plan would still have all the accounts with the same name.
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I think I could spend 2 years in min security prison for 5-10 mil and be happy about it.
Better enjoy it quickly - ill-gotten gains are confiscated. Here in UK under the Proceeds of Crime Act, I gather the US has something similar.
Wow, there's a big difference there... (Score:4, Insightful)
Obama administration: Defends corporate interests and their "right" to lock down on a market for maximum profit at the expense of the consumer.
Holy shit, that is a profound change. I understand know why the people on the extreme right are up in arms over all this socialism.
Quantum Random Bit Generator Service (Score:2)
CAPTCHA security - more worthless by the day [techworld.com] (23 July 2008)
The article suggests using the Quantum Random Bit Generator Service sign-up [random.irb.hr] approach; you do know your maths through at least calculus ... right?
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How about giving one of those RSA generator to everyone with access to the internet?
Or since we're talking about cash transactions here, why aren't the credit cards equipped with built-in RSA number generators yet?!
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Flip a bit, makes hash algorithms worthless but keeps the picture right.
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Not really a solution. Unless the pictures are quite large ( and then you wasting time and bandwidth transferring them) I can easily generate rainbow tables of the hash of each image with each combination of one or two bits flipped. An indexed table will let me match those hashes pretty quickly even with a few million rows. Hell with home systems having 4gigs of ram memory in them it would be easy.
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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.
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What I'm wondering is what the threat was that persuaded them to plead guilty.
The original indictment had 43 counts; they plead guilty to just one.
So maybe they simply didn't want to risk having to serve a N-times longer sentence (where N is greater than one and less than 44).
Re:Buzzwords cloud the issue (Score:4, Insightful)
What I don't understand is that the ticket vendors seem to be so concerned that the ticket purchaser is a real person who won't resell the ticket. But that's a problem that has already been solved by the airline industry. Security requirements dictate that airline tickets be non-transferrable - they're assigned to a specific individual at the time of purchase. You buy your airline tickets, and when you get to the airport you have to prove you're the person whose name is on the ticket. A driver's license or passport is the most common ID, but you can use the credit card used to buy the ticket as well.
If the ticket vendors really want to stop scalping, why don't they just attach a name to it at the time of sale? Then when a ticket holder tries to enter the venue, they can just cross-check the name associated with the ticket in the database with the ID proffered by the ticket holder. If you wish to buy a ticket as a gift, just make sure you use the recipient's name on the ticket. For people who suddenly can't attend the event, they can implement a buy-back system which credits the original purchaser with (say) 50% the ticket price. They can then sell that ticket to people waiting in a "standby" line the day of the event.
High Frequency Trading (Score:3, Interesting)
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Differences being
1. They're using a botnet, not their own servers.
2. They're purchasing the tickets under false identities, which is fraud.
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The high frequency traders have enough money to buy off law makers.
Not really a big deal (Score:2)
Why was it a scam? (Score:2)
Something is for sale, they bought it. Isn't that how it works in capitalism?
Your own network = botnet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Solution for this (Score:3)
As ohers have previously said, the problem here is that the tickets prices were not high enough (in a free market sense).
The solution would be to sell the tickets at the right price, that is, the price consumers are willing to pay.
I think a system like this would do the job
1. The day tickets go on sale, charge an outrageous amount (say, $100,000).
2. Then gradually decrease prices each day (or even every hour)
3. Last day the tickets would go on sale for $1
In that way, each person would decide which is the "right" price to pay. Do you *really* want to see this show? Would you risk missing it because you want to save a few bucks and wait until tomorrow? Do you think it would be a good deal to buy tickets now and resell them later for a profit? OK go ahead. How many tickets? At which price? Are you sure you will be able to sell them, considering that people willing to pay a higher price already had the opportunity to do so and refused?
That's a lot of effort (Score:2)
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.
The concert experience has pretty much been ruined (Score:3, Insightful)
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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.
Re:Capitalism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Capitalism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Goldman Sachs and others created a product, people were willing to buy a product at a certain price. There's a risk element just like there is with any other security. That's capitalism, what's wrong with that?
There is nothing wrong with that but those MBS and other derivatives were marketed as being less risky than lots of those guys knew they in fact were. There is nothing wrong with derivatives, the problem had to do with FRAUD up and down the line. People applying for loans gave fraudulent information to brokers, brokers fraudulently modified the applications farther or simply passed on the documents as vetted without doing it. Banks wrote the loans and then sold them to other banks fraudulently claiming their application processes were secure when they were knowingly doing nothing to verify what brokers will telling them. Those other banks lumped those loans into baskets of vary quality claiming that it was diversification and reduced risk. The trouble was because of all the FRAUD up and down the line many many more of the loans in those baskets of high quality mortgages were actually low quality. Knowing this they marketed the securities any way FRAUDULENTLY insisting they were safe. Then people bought insure on the investment which by this point many of these investors might not have know there were problems but many still did know and in those cases the FRAUDULENTLY characterized the risk the the insurer who went with it because they wanted to have the business to show their investors. The insurers probably knew what was going on as well but because of all the other FRAUD they were able to claim most of their exposure was only to high quality assets and push up their stock prices that way. Then because people had the insurance which was to affordable they used more leverage than they otherwise would buy more of the same FRAUD laden crap and repeated the process until it was unsustainable.
So the problem was not capitalism, but FRAUD and sadly none of the solutions actually involved prosecuting anyone from FRAUD.
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I agree, if TM they falsified there identities with TM than they broke the rules.
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.
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And yet people still pay the higher price. Scalping nets out to be third-party market optimization, even if the whole process is illegal or at best unethical.
Fair? Of course not. But nobody forced you to open your wallet either - seeing a concert or a game isn't a life or death situation. If this happened with something life-sustaining, then real problems arise.
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the price of tickets is below the demand driven price. this is why scalping exists. make it illegal and you create black market capitalism. as long as the opportunity for profit exists, then there will be capitalists ready to take advantage of it. It doesn't really matter how strongly you make your anti-capitalist arguments, the reality of this will still be there.
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The ticket is sold with an EULA ... breaking a contract for monetary gain is no more "black market capitalism" than robbing a convenience store.
The price of not getting shot is also below the demand driven price.
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as long as the opportunity for profit exists, then there will be capitalists ready to take advantage of it. It doesn't really matter how strongly you make your anti-capitalist arguments, the reality of this will still be there.
What's happening here is something like this: You bring along enormous tankers, and you empty all the ground tanks in every gas station. Then you sell gas from your tankers at a premium right outside the gas station. You've provided nothing of value, but you create an artificial scarcity in order to skim money off of other's work. Additionally you deprive people of the possibility to see a band live at the price which the band and venue agreed would be reasonable. This is very much a scam, in fact it is ill
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But from a societal perspective, it starts to put a bigger wedge between the haves and have-nots. Entertainment/Sports/etc. becomes a industry that can be enjoyed only if you have a certain amount of wealth.
Now ENTERTAINMENT is some sort of inherent right? Dang, the entitlement mentality in this country knows no bounds.
It was the act of a third party that may have priced out a potential consumers.
Um, it they are selling them for 2X the price, then people are still showing up for the concerts. If the scalper price is too high, they will go out of business.
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Re:Capitalism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism: The new religion of the 21st and 22nd century. Like all religions, dare ye not question it! For God is in the numbers. Everything has a price - everything must go! Sell your soul for a buck, you won't need where we're going. The only rule is that money rules all. Dig in, pig out, eat not your fill but everything you can take. Fuck your neighbours, what's yours is yours and what's theirs should be yours too! For the free market is divine and it commands that the only true virtue is greed. So pile on, like rats atop a sinking ship, for he who can reach the highest will eventually touch the sun, and be made supreme!
Welcome to paradise, don't mind the mess.
Someone stop the planet, I want off.
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+1 insightful if I were not just out of mod points. Brilliant!
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Oh, and artificial scarcity is good because it provides "incentive," and the fact that artificial scarcity needs to be promoted for certain goods which would otherwise be in an unlimited quantity in order to sustain our capitalistic ways is not at all a flaw in capitalism!
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Why? Why is what the market will support the moral arbiter?
Setting that aside, there's a reason tickets like those are priced lower than what the venue could get for them. It's to create shortage. Raising the prices would eliminate the shortage, sure. That's not what the venue, or the bands, want though. They want people fighting to get their hands on the ticket. By pricing the tickets lower they increase the number who will want to go to that show--and if they can't, then the next one (or the next on
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Why? Why is what the market will support the moral arbiter?
Setting that aside, there's a reason tickets like those are priced lower than what the venue could get for them. It's to create shortage.
You're wrong. The band and venue wants primarily as much people they can get attending, secondarily as much money as they can get (I work closely with people in the business). The scum from the article is skimming off the good work of the artist and the fans, this is in fact illegal where I live. Their goal is to create an artificial scarcity of tickets and sell theirs at a premium, thus fucking over the fans of the band. It has nothing to do with a free market. If you're a ticket scalper: FUCK YOU!
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Going through all that effort is a pretty clear demonstration they wanted the ticket more than other people who were not as highly motivated.
You obviously don't give a fuck about music. If you did, you'd be pretty pissed off by people who deprived you of a chance to see your favorite band live in order to make a quick buck. There is a reason why even the big ticket vendors put barriers in place to prevent this sort of behaviour.
If your idea of a free market is "burn all the competition's first aid kits if there is a hurricane, and sell your own at a premium", this is pretty much it. If you're a scalper: FUCK YOU
Re:Capitalism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
They weren't interested in paying more than other players, they were interested in hijacking access.. The free market model of capitalism requires all players to have equal information and access. In the real world this rarely happens because a few players will have some small to medium advantage over another player but that's just because information and access can't be perfectly distributed at the same time to all players. These guys registering thousands of placeholder domains and shell companies were artificially creating an INSANELY HUGE advantage for themselves and did not even vaguely represent a free market capitalism operation.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I just don't get what the big deal is here.
Re: (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.
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That is merely a civil matter. Why are there criminal charges involved here? After all, they did not defraud ticketmaster, they PAID for the tickets.
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Automating the purchase of tickets so that you're able to purchase them faster than other people is now illegal hacking and will get one charged with wire fraud? Ludicrous...
Re:Capitalism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like they hacked anyone's servers and got tickets that they shouldn't have had access to.
It sounds like that's exactly what they did in order to build a botnet to purchase the tickets for them.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this any different than getting all of your friends and family to hop on Ticketmaster the second tickets become available to increase your chances?
1) Your family isn't doing it for profit.
2) You're not reselling the tickets at a markup, which is illegal.
3) You and your family hasn't paid up with the right politicians to get favorable protectionist laws written up for them.
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Because those families lack the sophistication and resources to leverage several thousand servers across 6 continents to buy not a couple, but many thousands, of tickets, and then resell them at significantly higher rates. Your family is not responsible for causing an artists attempt to make his/her concert accessible to people who could not afford to attend at market rates fail miserably. All those friends and family, in short, were not so greedy they caused a substantial shift in cost and availability in
Re: (Score:2)
Clearly, since the tickets weren't being auctioned off, the primary seller is attempting to remove market pressures. If someone wants to give something away (such as selling tickets below market value), their ability to limit their gifts to one/person is paramount to that transaction being able to take place. Since the permissibility of scalping causes desired transactions not to be able to performed, we have to choose which type of transaction is allowed.
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Answer is simple: Capitalism at work is so wrong.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait...
The events already had a monopoly on tickets.
The monopoly is a pre-existing fact, a built in shortage.
The BOUGHT the tickets, lots of them. Not ALL the tickets.
Just how do you equate this with a monopoly?
Re: (Score:2)
They're probably going to be nailed for hacking as a part of building their botnet in the first place.
Scalping might not be illegal, but electronic trespass sure is.
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It's no different than what guys like George Soros do...
How is this any different than Ticketmaster scooping up all the good seats and auctioning them off on their own?
The difference would be that these guys are using a botnet and cause what is in essence a denial of service attack. Ticketmaster, on the other hand, probably has a deal with the vendors; these guys do not.
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.
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No, that's not correct either.
The "good" genius works for the corporations. The "evil" genius controls the corporations.
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Are you really that dense?
after hiring Bulgarian programmers to build 'a nationwide network of computers that impersonated individual visitors'
They rented a botnet to buy the tickets with. I don't expect you to RTFA before posting, but is the summary that much to ask for?
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So if you sign up for gmail and say that you are from Beverly Hills 90210 and your name is Darth Vader then you should be convicted and go to jail for committing fraud against Google because you are using an assumed name?
"In order to access certain Services, you may be required to provide information about yourself (such as identification or contact details) as part of the registration process for the Service, or as part of your continued use of the Services. You agree that any registration information you
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Moreso, the artists/promoters could tune the auction to deliver the preferred result, maximum profit or maximum venue capacity.
Smart auction-ware could even detect larger or smaller than expected demand, and switch to a larger/smaller venue; either increasing profits, or increasing crowd-density & atmosphere.
If you have scalpers, you are doing it wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
What if they don't want to maximise their profit? What happens if people are not jerks? Are you going to demand that of them?