A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them
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A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them
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Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them
#2"Wiseguy learned that Ticketmaster's CAPTCHA system had only loaded 30,000 unique images into its database, rather than millions. So Lowson's team downloaded every image they could find as a .jpeg file, stayed up all night typing them out, and taught their bot how to match the images."
Wow. I had the impression Ticketmaster had invested a lot of thought into anti bot tech. Apparently not.
Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them
#3> "There's an emotional aspect to what artists do, which is to say 'I'm not willing to charge $500 even though clearly the market value is $500. I'm going to charge $100, and at the end of the day someone else is going to make that money,'"
The bots are just a symptom. Seems like this is likely the root of the problem. If the primary market was efficient, then there would be no secondary market, and the whole point of developing these bots and sophisticates scalping systems would be moot.
Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them
#4"Wiseguy learned that Ticketmaster's CAPTCHA system had only loaded 30,000 unique images into its database, rather than millions. So Lowson's team downloaded every image they could find as a .jpeg file, stayed up all night typing them out, and taught their bot how to match the images." Wow. I had the impression Ticketmaster had invested a lot of thought into anti bot tech. Apparently not.
What is more interesting about that statement is how did he learn that fact? Possibly some help from the inside? Or some other method...?
Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them
#5"Wiseguy learned that Ticketmaster's CAPTCHA system had only loaded 30,000 unique images into its database, rather than millions. So Lowson's team downloaded every image they could find as a .jpeg file, stayed up all night typing them out, and taught their bot how to match the images." Wow. I had the impression Ticketmaster had invested a lot of thought into anti bot tech. Apparently not.
What is more interesting about that statement is how did he learn that fact? Possibly some help from the inside? Or some other method...?
Probably just started saving them. The value on doing so was high enough that even if it was 10's of millions it would be worth doing. It's not particularly expensive (other than time) to do so.
Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them
#6I wrote this story and am happy to answer any questions you guys might have. Lots of information I ended up not using because the article was already incredibly long or I couldn't corroborate it (but believe it to be true from various interviews), etc.
Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them
#7"Wiseguy learned that Ticketmaster's CAPTCHA system had only loaded 30,000 unique images into its database, rather than millions. So Lowson's team downloaded every image they could find as a .jpeg file, stayed up all night typing them out, and taught their bot how to match the images." Wow. I had the impression Ticketmaster had invested a lot of thought into anti bot tech. Apparently not.
What is more interesting about that statement is how did he learn that fact? Possibly some help from the inside? Or some other method...?
Just scrape.. store the captchas, use Amazon Turk, have them store the image + word in a database to recognize automatically later, and then realize the database never seems to increase in size.
Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them
#8> The scourge of ticket bots and the immorality of the shady ticket scalpers using them is conventional wisdom
I very much disagree.
If I am willing to pay the asking price for tickets, I should be able to buy them. If you're offering them so cheaply that I will happily buy all of the tickets then you're offering them too cheap and you can't really complain if I buy them.
If it weren't for ticket-scalpers, die-hard fans who are willing to pay extra to secure a place would have no option. Thanks to ticket-scalpers, it is possible for die-hard fans to ensure they can get one even if the tickets are "sold out" by just offering more money.
This is a classic case of an inefficient market being made more efficient.
Without ticket scalping: the original seller sells all the tickets. Some fans get to watch the gig, and others don't, and the availability of tickets bears no relation to how much you're willing to pay to get hold of one, only to how quickly you decide to book one.
With ticket scalping: the original seller sells all their tickets more quickly. The fans who want to see the gig the most get to see it, with less chance of tickets being made unavailable by people who don't want to see it as badly (i.e. don't want to pay as much money), and the ticket scalper makes a profit. Everyone's a winner.
Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them
#9"Wiseguy learned that Ticketmaster's CAPTCHA system had only loaded 30,000 unique images into its database, rather than millions. So Lowson's team downloaded every image they could find as a .jpeg file, stayed up all night typing them out, and taught their bot how to match the images." Wow. I had the impression Ticketmaster had invested a lot of thought into anti bot tech. Apparently not.
What is more interesting about that statement is how did he learn that fact? Possibly some help from the inside? Or some other method...?
He might've tried to write a computer vision solution to solve TicketMaster captchas.
In order to test your solution, you need a bank of images to test from. So you download the first, say, 50k. And realize that you're getting a whole lot of repeats.
30k is still really annoying to get around without computer vision. But OpenCV is really, really fun and easy to use.
Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them
#10I'm still trying to understand why they don't just auction tickets.