Company reaps $25,000,000 hacking TicketMaster & others . . .

I don't see how this is a criminal suit and not a civil suit. What they did was clearly against the wishes and TOS of TicketMaster, the MLB, and others. But criminal? Hardly.

They found a way to buy tickets better than the rest of us.

Why the government is pursuing criminal charges on behest of TicketMaster and Co. baffles me.

This isn't an industry, and these aren't companies, that I think need a lot of protection from Uncle Sam.

As far as I'm concerned, a program which automatically purchases tickets through TicketMaster is more of a feature than a federal crime; the process for a law-abiding citizen is horrendously convoluted and a complete UX disaster. Too bad TM gets away with it, thanks to their monopoly.

I've spent enough time in the ticketing industry to know that it's right up there with "accai berry" and the like in terms of shadiness. Anybody who thinks StubHub et. al. are "fan marketplaces" is severely delusional; 99% of all tickets are listed by brokers who do it for a living (most of whom use less-efficient ways to circumvent TM security, however. That 25MM number is the only reason this is being prosecuted so vigorously.)

Hardly "hacking," and I have a difficult time understanding how that is at all fraudulent. What am I missing?

The indictment has lots of interesting technical details about what they were doing.

Also very interesting and not mentioned in the article is on page 27: 41. It was further part of the conspiracy that, in or about 2008, having damaged the Online Ticket Vendors' ability to distribute Event tickets fairly on a first-come, first-served basis, defendants LOWSON and KIRSCH would establish and operate Renaissance Events Management ("REM"), a company that proposed to sell Event tickets on behalf of artists and venues as a competitor of Online Ticket Vendors.

a. Wire fraud. They probably had some type of fake bank accounts set up or something to launder the money because they knew what they were doing was wrong.

b. The tickets were sold at substantially higher prices than on Ticketmaster. They were able to do this by gaming the system/or cracking the schemes in place (captcha's) to prevent people from doing this.

c. On a lighter note, they named their company Wiseguys Tickets. That's like the Mafia naming themselves Mafia, Inc. - "We Handle The Rough Stuff". A name like Wiseguys Tickets is just asking to be investigated.

Selling tickets for fixed price is kinda strange idea. They should put up some continuous auction. Maybe that would better reflect the actual value of tickets at different moments in time.

What if Subway were to offer subs for a dollar next Tuesday with the stipulation that each customer could only purchase one. And, like Iraqi voting procedures, Subway would mark customers' hands to prevent them from making multiple purchases. Let's say I found some solvent that removed the marking and was therefore able to purchase 50 subs and sold them on the nearest corner for a profit. Is this illegal?

Assigning a non-unique id to CAPTCHAs that are reused kind of defeats the purpose I guess.

I was a dev at Ticketmaster for 2 years(Perl, blech!), got laid off(during the worst job market of all time, thanks!), then out of the blue got a call from a recruiter to interview with this company. They were going by the name "REM", one of their shell companies. Their office was Beverly Hills adjacent on a top floor in the AIG building, across the street from the fancy hotel where the President stays when he's in LA. Snazzy real estate indeed, so they were obviously making a lot of dough to afford that kind of rent. I interviewed with Ken, the company owner and primary defendant in the DOJ's doc, for a little over an hour.

I realized pretty quickly into it that this wasn't a legit smaller indie ticketing company, but an all out scalper company. Ken did talk too openly about his operations, so my spidey-sense was going off that it wasn't legit. Having been in the ticketing industry, I was able to have a more detailed conversation with him about various practices. It was pretty clear all his money was coming from scraping TM. I think the first thing he said that set off my red alarm was "every programmer I have is paired with an off-shore Romanian programmer who does the work." (My mind's translation: "Uh-oh, run, you'll be miserable here, at yet-another company that doesn't really get nor care about software.")

I did find it fascinating to hear about ticketing from the other side of the fence, after being at TM, where the daily war of attrition against brokers & bots is permanent and unwinnable, the scalpers attain an aura of mystery & annoyance. If you sell a lot of tickets, but don't lock down your site with captchas and go all out with engineering clever session/identity persistence strategies, the scalper bots of the world will absolutely kill you on traffic, while continuously holding up your entire inventory, and ruin your real customer's experience.

After realizing it was a scalper company and deducing that they were making millions on a startup-sized skeleton team, I thought why the hell not go work for them, for a few months maybe, it'll be awful (the ticketing industry sucks to develop in because you can't do anything customers really want), but nobody else in West LA was hiring and I was desperate that month. The way I see it, merely scraping a web site violates TOS, not criminal law. I had no idea that the logistics of this kind of enterprise also involved complex financial fraud, so I wouldn't have pursued this if I knew that aspect. I figured at the time that if I was going to do thankless development for a scam company getting rich off of skimming off of an even bigger unofficial monopolist who themselves are skimming off from the general public under a blind and lumbering gov't regulator, who just got rid of my job at the height of all-out market panic, all in an industry I want to get out of, and in a niche where I can't be open about anything I do and where loyalty is valued more than my programming-wizardry, then I better charge those jerks a high price.

So I told Ken I wanted at least $125k/yr and I never heard back from him after he said he wanted to make me an offer. I figured good riddance, no sense in getting involved with a crap job if they won't put their money where their mouth is—company's who talk big are a dime a dozen. However, I was puzzled why he didn't complete the offer, as everything they were doing was stuff I knew all about from my time at TM, so I thought I was his ideal candidate. Based on the DOJ pdf case file, they were making $40 million a year, making my salary request mere pocket change to them.

As you can see from my linked email screenshot, they weren't looking for any specific technical skills, but were instead soliciting blind loyalty above all. If that's the primary skill you need from your devs, then it's another red flag indicating a pretty bad working environment and crappy development process.

Ultimately I think he didn't hire me because of something I said during the interview along the lines of "TM could put you out of business overnight if they just knew you existed, because scraping simply isn't a technically feasible solution on a growing scale large enough for it to work indefinitely." Scam artists hate being outed by smarter people, so I proved I wasn't a lackey-type. Knowing TM's system, it simply can't be scraped on a wide scale without privileged insider access(i.e. scalping your own tickets, ala the Ticketsnow fiasco) without getting noticed and shut down. Plus they have the greatest security-by-obscurity of any other company I know: there's an entire 2nd back-end, behind the entire customer facing LAMP stack, of emulated VAXen running legacy Pascal code originally written in 1982 and left running since then. Yes, when you buy a ticket from TM, the tickets come out of a VAX, which is embarrassing as far as "innovation", considering it's now 2010.

I think it's really too bad the DOJ went after these guys instead of truly fixing the broken ticketing industry. This action by DOJ helps TM more than it helps anyone else(getting the gov't to kill your competition is sweet deal and an ancient tactic). I think the DOJ has their priorities backwards. Ultimately the consumers lose because they pay higher prices for lower quality, non-innovative services. They knock out one of the little parasites, who's botnet was probably causing huge headaches for TM, yet allow the LN+TM merger to go through, creating a whole new type of unfair monopoly. It's forrest for the trees, man.

Ideally I'd like to see the ticketing market resemble a stock exchange, and not an airline. I wish some startup would build this site! Every ticket that can be sold should be publicly listed, so nobody can unfairly profit by having private information about ticket inventory and price levels. (This ideal can be proven using game theory with asymmetric information!) There would be a few more mechanisms to design the right way to balance out the dynamics of the system and keep it fair, similar to how financial companies are regulated. Right now TM has a sweetheart deal, getting to play both sides of the fence—being an unregulated, de-facto market-maker, while not having to make the same kinds of fair concessions to the pubic in exchange for being allowed to be a market-maker(such as no front-running like Goldman Sachs).

Also, if on the off-chance anyone out there is thinking about doing something innovative with ticketing platforms + web + iphone, and if your plan is "crazy enough that it just might work", and if you're in LA, and if you're hiring, and if you're using Rails, hit me up! I'm looking for a job! I keep an eye out for this type of idealized ticketing company. I think it'll be a few more years until I see it, when some player can get enough leverage to take on LN+TM, both of whom truly are technical dinosaurs just waiting to get taken down by a pure Internet company. The real get-rich mystery to solve is what form that leverage will appear in. Really, the ticketing industry really is that inefficient, it's like someone left $100 million dollars just sitting there, for anyone to take, if they can spot how.

I wish the article had more details, so I could confirm or refute my suspicion that nothing was "hacked".