Three man based in California have pleaded guilty for making more than USD 25 M reselling illegally purchased tickets to concerts and sporting events by hiring cheap Bulgarian programmers.
The three Californians owned a company called Wiseguy Tickets, and had for years an inside track on some of the best seats in the house at many events. including Broadway productions, Bruce Springsteen concerts and TV tapings of Dancing with the Stars.
The ring of hackers working for Wiseguy Tickets achieved that by cracking security measures at Ticketmaster and other major vendors by hiring Bulgarian programmers.
By working with the Bulgarian programmers, California-based Wiseguy Ticketssidestepped a technology known as CAPTCHA, which required users to read, then retype, distorted images of letters and numbers to buy tickets. The Bulgarians developed a bot, which successfully deceived the mechanism.
As a result, the bots flooded the vendor sites and bought hundreds of choice tickets in split-second transactions.
Subsequently, they sold the premium seats at inflated prices to brokers who resold them at even higher markups to the public. Thus, Wiseguy Tickets earned more than USD 25 M, as prosecutors tally it.
The Bulgarian hackers were hired in exchange for as little as USD 1 000 a month to perpetrate the scam.
Novinite
