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Comment by robtaylor | Hacker News Reader

"A lot of times the concerts weren’t sold out at all, but we pretended it was. It was just a lie. Pretty much 100% of our traffic came in through AdWords, people would search “Something-something concerts tickets”, got an ad from us, and be duped in to buying them at ridiculous prices."

Sounds very scummy.

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It gets worse

> At one point I learned that one company we connected with would literally just invent concerts: they would guess “they’re probably doing a tour next year” and start “pre-selling” tickets for it at extraordinary prices.

Hey now, it's just branch prediction !

You should get into marketing!

Marketing to geeks

The author agrees

“I very much regret working on this First job, insecure about your career prospects and whether you’re able to get a new job, and it becomes easy to rationalize these things to yourself.”

The scam works because they put you under time pressure and the refund laws for internet purchases have an exception for concerts/events. So you think it is almost sold out and you can just get your 2 tickets you want for 200 bucks, you order, afterwards you realize... Wait a minute... There are official sellers... but that's it, you have to pay.

Let's hope karma exists.

It’s not like the big promoters don’t have a taste for this just as well.

Welcome to the machine!

Google censors YouTube in the name of protecting people from their own stupidity, meanwhile profiting from the same phenomena through AdWords.

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