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Comment by redstripe | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

OK, I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, but aren't they providing value by making the market more efficient? ;) That is, they're providing a service to the music industry and the artists it represents by enabling ticket prices to reflect their true value rather than some artificially-capped value.

I don't really believe this of course, but from a 10,000 ft view, it's not such a different argument from the one hedge fund folks would make to justify the "value" they create. Yes, I realize the two situations are different, but there's still a point to be made somewhere in there.

If their customers are not satisfied, it is a problem for the online ticket sellers, and at least one service the Wiseguys are providing is that the ticket sellers must keep innovating to figure out a better way to serve their customers. Why don't the ticket sellers just eliminate the middle-men (the Wiseguys) and just do what they are doing?

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.

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.

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.

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