5 ms·

Hacking Ticketmaster

16 points by KC8ZKF 17y ago

lars512 17y ago
Part of me feels like this is a natural phenomenon since ticket prices are artificially deflated, so as to be accessible to the broadest range of fans. This creates a gap between what people are willing to pay and the price they are offered, and the gap creates services like this. Perhaps ticket sellers should keep the very best seats and auction them off, uncapping their price. The rest could be put in a lottery, and kept open for two weeks or so. Then, only fans who win tickets pay money for them, for a low and accessible price. That would be far fairer than the current first-come first-served, overload the server system. You could also introduce a delay between closing the lottery and announcing the results, giving you time to scan for bot submissions.
- teaspoon 17y ago
  I'm curious, is there a lottery-based alternative to TicketMaster? Or an option to use lottery rather than FCFS within TicketMaster? If not, I think that would be a great project for a handful of enterprising engineers. There would be some legal and payment-related related problems to solve, I'm sure, as well as whatever barriers are supporting TicketMaster's current monopoly. But if there were ever a foothold for a new contender to take them on, this seems like it.
  - kgrin 17y ago
    a) The barriers supporting Ticketmaster's current monopoly are pretty significant - mainly, exclusivity deals with venues. Ironically, the most successful challenge thus far has come from LiveNation... which managed to one-up Ticketmaster in some markets by owning both venues and artists. (And is now trying to merge with Ticketmaster, pending fairly blatant antitrust issues). b) Interesting sidenote: in its day, Ticketmaster was the tech-savvy upstart, aggressively competing on both the business and tech side with the then-dominant Ticketron. (That's not to say that they're not a monopolist ripe for the picking...)
- cduan 17y ago
  There are plenty of good reasons for selling tickets at lower-than-necessary prices on a first-come, first-served basis. If tickets were sold at market price (or auctioned off), they would tend to go to more affluent--and likely then older--customers. If they were sold by lottery, then they would be distributed to random customers. However, ticket sellers want to sell to younger customers who are more likely to become loyal fans, buy merchandise, promote to friends, etc. The low prices help attract younger customers who likely are not as well off, and the first-come, first-serve policy tends to weed out customers who only have a marginal interest (and thus would not serve as loyal fans). This isn't to say that this business model is the best; just to point out that there are more considerations than the volume of tickets sold or fairness in the sales.
redstripe 17y ago
I don't understand how this counts as fraud. Ticket master got paid for their tickets by the purchasers right? Today at Old Navy they were offering 20% off my jeans if I gave them my email address. Should I go to jail for giving them an invalid one?
- rscott 17y ago
  Pretty simple why it's illegal. They made up fake people, contact info, and email addresses that weren't tied to real people. The terms of the site don't allow that and when you are buying tens of thousands of tickets, people tend to notice.
  - steve19 17y ago
    Since when it making up fake contact info illegal? It is not a criminal offense to breech the terms of a website (unless the offense is criminal in the first place). There must be more to this story.
  - korch 17y ago
    Buried in the details of the indictment, they show Wiseguys had a reciprocating agreement with downstream broker clients to provide virgin credit cards used in the bulk ticket purchases. i.e. Give me a clean card with a high($100k+) limit, and pay an X% "service charge", then I'll buy you any tickets you want using my scalper-bot-net. I'm not sure what the exact rules are for requiring a real identity to be linked to a corporate credit card. In this case, the broker's corp cards were not being used in the same way a typical employee would expense a purchase to the business. Rather, Wiseguys was just making up fake identities, and providing their own employees real identities for cards(this was the mistake that got them noticed). All of this is pretty straight forward financial fraud on the banking side of things, and not Ticketmaster's ToS.
- henrikschroder 17y ago
  That's exactly the rub, proving that this is fraud, or creating new legislation that make it fraud, is very difficult. I hope you at least agree that they do not provide a service of any kind? They grab a limited resource and resell it, while adding no value whatsoever. They just grab it first and capitalize on the difference between the long-term and short-term best market prices for tickets. I'd say the best solution to the problem is simply to take the thing partially offline again. Botnets can always out-crowd users, but you can't outcrowd actual people.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- Confusion 17y ago
  Personally, I may be more angry at Ticketmaster for sucking than at the hackers. What makes you so sure Ticketmaster could actually do anything about it?
  - lini 17y ago
    They can print the first name of the customer on the ticket and make sure someone matches the name to an ID at the venue. Simple solution that will make the scalper's life very difficult.
paulbaumgart 17y ago
I have the same question as when this story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=648578 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=648578 was posted. Why would anyone ever do this while operating from the United States? There are countries with much laxer law enforcement. And, as a bonus, $6 million/person will go a lot farther in most of those countries.
kgrin 17y ago
Stuff like this was part of the reason some artists (including Springsteen) started experimenting with "paperless ticketing" (i.e. they check the purchaser's ID at the gate, so it's basically impossible, or at least significantly harder, to resell tickets).
1amzave 17y ago
Jeeze...sleazebags hacking sleazebags. I saw the headline and thought "cool!", but then read the article and was disappointed -- I'd been hoping for some kind of stick-it-to-the-man, fight-the-monopoly sort of thing...sigh. Personally, I've just got ticketmaster.com mapped to an invalid IP address in /etc/hosts -- reminds me not to give them any money (or traffic, for that matter).

16 points by KC8ZKF 17y ago

Part of me feels like this is a natural phenomenon since ticket prices are artificially deflated, so as to be accessible to the broadest range of fans. This creates a gap between what people are willing to pay and the price they are offered, and the gap creates services like this. Perhaps ticket sellers should keep the very best seats and auction them off, uncapping their price. The rest could be put in a lottery, and kept open for two weeks or so. Then, only fans who win tickets pay money for them, for a low and accessible price. That would be far fairer than the current first-come first-served, overload the server system. You could also introduce a delay between closing the lottery and announcing the results, giving you time to scan for bot submissions.

teaspoon 17y ago
I'm curious, is there a lottery-based alternative to TicketMaster? Or an option to use lottery rather than FCFS within TicketMaster? If not, I think that would be a great project for a handful of enterprising engineers. There would be some legal and payment-related related problems to solve, I'm sure, as well as whatever barriers are supporting TicketMaster's current monopoly. But if there were ever a foothold for a new contender to take them on, this seems like it.
- kgrin 17y ago
  a) The barriers supporting Ticketmaster's current monopoly are pretty significant - mainly, exclusivity deals with venues. Ironically, the most successful challenge thus far has come from LiveNation... which managed to one-up Ticketmaster in some markets by owning both venues and artists. (And is now trying to merge with Ticketmaster, pending fairly blatant antitrust issues). b) Interesting sidenote: in its day, Ticketmaster was the tech-savvy upstart, aggressively competing on both the business and tech side with the then-dominant Ticketron. (That's not to say that they're not a monopolist ripe for the picking...)
cduan 17y ago
There are plenty of good reasons for selling tickets at lower-than-necessary prices on a first-come, first-served basis. If tickets were sold at market price (or auctioned off), they would tend to go to more affluent--and likely then older--customers. If they were sold by lottery, then they would be distributed to random customers. However, ticket sellers want to sell to younger customers who are more likely to become loyal fans, buy merchandise, promote to friends, etc. The low prices help attract younger customers who likely are not as well off, and the first-come, first-serve policy tends to weed out customers who only have a marginal interest (and thus would not serve as loyal fans). This isn't to say that this business model is the best; just to point out that there are more considerations than the volume of tickets sold or fairness in the sales.

redstripe 17y ago

I don't understand how this counts as fraud. Ticket master got paid for their tickets by the purchasers right? Today at Old Navy they were offering 20% off my jeans if I gave them my email address. Should I go to jail for giving them an invalid one?

rscott 17y ago
Pretty simple why it's illegal. They made up fake people, contact info, and email addresses that weren't tied to real people. The terms of the site don't allow that and when you are buying tens of thousands of tickets, people tend to notice.
- steve19 17y ago
  Since when it making up fake contact info illegal? It is not a criminal offense to breech the terms of a website (unless the offense is criminal in the first place). There must be more to this story.
- korch 17y ago
  Buried in the details of the indictment, they show Wiseguys had a reciprocating agreement with downstream broker clients to provide virgin credit cards used in the bulk ticket purchases. i.e. Give me a clean card with a high($100k+) limit, and pay an X% "service charge", then I'll buy you any tickets you want using my scalper-bot-net. I'm not sure what the exact rules are for requiring a real identity to be linked to a corporate credit card. In this case, the broker's corp cards were not being used in the same way a typical employee would expense a purchase to the business. Rather, Wiseguys was just making up fake identities, and providing their own employees real identities for cards(this was the mistake that got them noticed). All of this is pretty straight forward financial fraud on the banking side of things, and not Ticketmaster's ToS.
henrikschroder 17y ago
That's exactly the rub, proving that this is fraud, or creating new legislation that make it fraud, is very difficult. I hope you at least agree that they do not provide a service of any kind? They grab a limited resource and resell it, while adding no value whatsoever. They just grab it first and capitalize on the difference between the long-term and short-term best market prices for tickets. I'd say the best solution to the problem is simply to take the thing partially offline again. Botnets can always out-crowd users, but you can't outcrowd actual people.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

Confusion 17y ago
Personally, I may be more angry at Ticketmaster for sucking than at the hackers. What makes you so sure Ticketmaster could actually do anything about it?
- lini 17y ago
  They can print the first name of the customer on the ticket and make sure someone matches the name to an ID at the venue. Simple solution that will make the scalper's life very difficult.

paulbaumgart 17y ago

I have the same question as when this story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=648578 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=648578 was posted. Why would anyone ever do this while operating from the United States? There are countries with much laxer law enforcement. And, as a bonus, $6 million/person will go a lot farther in most of those countries.

kgrin 17y ago

Stuff like this was part of the reason some artists (including Springsteen) started experimenting with "paperless ticketing" (i.e. they check the purchaser's ID at the gate, so it's basically impossible, or at least significantly harder, to resell tickets).

1amzave 17y ago

Jeeze...sleazebags hacking sleazebags. I saw the headline and thought "cool!", but then read the article and was disappointed -- I'd been hoping for some kind of stick-it-to-the-man, fight-the-monopoly sort of thing...sigh. Personally, I've just got ticketmaster.com mapped to an invalid IP address in /etc/hosts -- reminds me not to give them any money (or traffic, for that matter).