It’s 23:56 on a Sunday night and you are ready to buy your tickets for Beyoncé that are going on sale at midnight. Are you going to be one of the lucky ones to score a ticket? To increase your chances to get a ticket you have set up your mom’s iPad and your brother’s laptop. However, within minutes your hope disappears as a message appears that the tickets are sold out.
Ken Lowson, a former bot operator in the U.S. stated he had the capacity to buy 15.000 tickets in only 2 minutes of time with the use of programmed bots (Common, 2016). The software-based bots enable the operator to choose from hundreds of tickets for a concert or event, in which they can select the ticket that best fits their preferences. By entering the ticket criteria and the right personal data including payment details into the system the bot could be programmed to start working at a certain time and collect tickets that match the set criteria’s (Koebler, 2017). Ken Lowson, was one of the founders of WiseGuy Tickets one of the most known ticket businesses that used a network of preinstalled bots. These bots would surpass the virtual waiting lines in order to grab very popular concert of sport event tickets. Lowson’s network of bots would surpass the security systems that were developed to prevent customers from using automated ticket-buying software (Zetter, 2017). The bots would operate individually form each other by using different aliases and credit card data which made it look like different customers would buy the tickets. In this way, the WiseGuy was able to grab around a million tickets for events which they would sell for a marked-up price. Per ticket, they would make an approximate profit of 25 dollars, which would be over 25 million dollars in total. (Koebler, 2017) The company was operative between 2002 and 2009 until the FBI pressed charges, and accused the WiseGuy of illegal use of programmed software to surpass CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA is a tool used on websites which determines if a user is a human or computer. CAPTCHA prevent bots from entering, for example, ticket purchase pages, by letting customers solve a small puzzle before allowing them to enter the next page. In March 2011, the founders of WiseGuy were found guilty but agreed to a settlement of one million US dollars to be paid to the US Department of Justice. Even though, websites like Ticketmaster and the BOTS law signed by Obama forbid the use of automated software to circumvent the system and take profit from reselling it remains a big challenge to find and exclude bots. (Zetter, 2017) However, order to protect customers from overpaying on tickets, more transparency around ticket prices, number of tickets and buying information should also be provided by authorized ticket sales and distribution companies in order to make a good buying decision. Will customers ever be able to buy tickets without overpaying or being very lucky? The future will tell, however, Ken Lowson turned around his behaviour and founded a new company to increase ticket information transparency and desires to remove and shut down every professional ticket scalper business. (Rendon, 2017)
CBC News. (2016, October 20). ‘Scalper bots’ that scoop up concert tickets to be outlawed in Ontario. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/scalper-bots-ontario-1.3813837
Common, D. (2016, October 22). How brokers and bots prevent you from getting the ticket you want. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ticket-industry-bots-resellers-1.3811994
Koebler, J. (2017, February 10). The Man Who Broke Ticketmaster. Retrieved from https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxqb8/the-man-who-broke-ticketmaster
Rendon, A. F. (2017, June 30). PollstarPro: Opinion: Ken Lowson Speaks On Ticketing. Retrieved from https://www.pollstarpro.com/NewsContent.aspx?cat=0&com=1&ArticleID=831082
Zetter, K. (2017, June 04). Wiseguys Plead Guilty in Ticketmaster Captcha Case. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2010/11/wiseguys-plead-guilty/
Hello Annelien. I enjoyed reading your post, and I appreciated its relevance since I do believe that most of us deal with “bots” like this more frequently than we notice. One example that comes to mind is Amsterdam’s upcoming ADE events, which has over 300 parties with are accompanied by 2,000+ DJ’s. Experience has shown that the biggest events are sold out within the first 30 seconds of being posted online, which makes me quite curious how many of these tickets are acquired through bots just to be resold for a higher price. I was wondering about your views on the implementation of AI in bypassing the CAPTCHA measure. As far as I can tell most CAPTCHA tools make use of tests that focus on “keeping it simple” for their actual consumers, and I can’t help but feel that AI is currently progressing at a rate that will make these relatively simple tests completely redundant in the near future. Would you agree?
Hi Philip, thank you very much for reading my blog and for commenting on my post.
To answer your question on my sights of using AI to surpass the ticket system, I think there are multiple ways in which fans experience disadvantages that are not only caused by bots surpassing the CAPTCHA. It is argued in multiple articles (Leswing, 2016; Knowles, Pistone;2017)) that lots of tickets are already reserved for business-related relations, radio stations, influencers and of course friends and family. To fight against bots Ticketmaster is coming up with a new way to improve their system with a new feature called “verified fan.” In which artists can require fans to use a certified fan account in order to be able to buy tickets. However, the downside is that making the system harder to enter is also having an effect on customer satisfaction. But it does not prevent bots from polluting the system, according to Ken. In the interview (Rendon,2017.) I already used in it was also argued by Ken that Ticketmaster could improve this fairly easy “I am not a robot” / puzzles and “Verified fan” program, but that it slowed improvements on this problem. According to Ken, the foremost reason is that Ticketmaster is making money since they have an extra site that allows fans to resell their tickets. According to the article, Ticketmaster is making a lot of profit off this second reselling channel. Ken argues that Ticketmaster allows bot operators on their sites only if they agree to give them a stake in the profit the bot operators make by reselling their tickets via Ticketmaster’s reselling site. The condition in this shady deal is that the operators are not allowed to list the tickets on for example a site like StubHub, but when they do actually do this Ticketmaster will expose them to the Feds. I would be very shocked if that is actually the way Ticketmaster does business. So as you can imagine the whole situation is very complicated.
My personal opinion is that a site like Ticketmaster should be there for the fans and shouldn’t search for even more ways to commercialize on tickets. They should focus on keeping Bots out of the system. They should be about connecting fans to their favorite artists and give them an opportunity to live their dreams. It is now one men’s word against Ticketmaster, but I do have hope that systems will change and that fans will be able to get their so wanted tickets.
Leswing, K. (2016, June 07). Ticketmaster’s former CEO explains how robots are scamming you out of concert tickets. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/ticket-buying-bots-are-rampant-says-former-ticketmaster-ceo-2016-6?international=true&r=US&IR=T
Pistone, A., & Knowles, J. (2017, May 22). Buying concert tickets often ‘rigged game’ costing fans more. Retrieved from http://abc13.com/entertainment/buying-concert-tickets-often-rigged-game-costing-fans-more/2023283/
Rendon, A. F. (2017, June 30). PollstarPro: Opinion: Ken Lowson Speaks On Ticketing. Retrieved from https://www.pollstarpro.com/NewsContent.aspx?cat=0&com=1&ArticleID=831082
Hi Annelien,
In the past two weeks, I have tried to purchase tickets for two events. Both purchases failed. The first was a ticket for a small venue in Amsterdam accommodating 1.000 people. I logged in at 11.59h and tickets were not yet available. Then, I refreshed the page and only 30 seconds later, at 12.00h, the tickets were sold out. The other time, I wanted to purchase tickets for a concert at Lanxess Arena in Cologne which has a capacity of holding 20.000 (!) people. I had been waiting in a digital cue for 20 minutes, only to find out that tickets were – again – sold out.
Since I did not know a lot about ticket bots, your blogpost was of great interest to me. After reading, I simply googled “ticket bot” and the first result was the link to a website where you can purchase different types of ticket bot custom software. It amazed me how easy it apparently is to use a bot yourself.
When thinking about the issue, two solutions come to my mind. A first, simple solution to the issue might be to create verified accounts for ticket providers by adding a phone number and / or sending a copy of your ID. Furhter, everyone who wishes to purchase a limit should be able to order a capacity of a certain amount of tickets.
Another approach might be to personalize tickets in such a way as it happens on plane tickets. This way, tickets cannot be sold easily or change owners only for an extra fee.
Let’s hope that a solution to the issue can be found quickly and all fans have a better chance to see their favorite artists!
Hi Annelien,
Thanks for your interesting blog, I did not even know those robots were such a huge problem in the ticket selling market… And it sounds as this guy Ken is a little bit mysterious, as he is trying to help the people now he used to scam?! I think this problem will hold on, as the secondary market is too profitable (Economist.com, 2017). To get rid of those robots, you have to tackle that secondary market. This could be done by making the initial prices of the tickets higher, so that people’s threshold to pay more for those tickets is higher and profitability in the secondary market becomes lower. However, this can lead of course to even less people going to the concerts, which is not good for the artists, as often the tickets are already quite expensive. Personalizing tickets could be an alternative as well, as robots are not able to do this, but it limits the flexibility of the tickets sold by consumers. Ticketmaster claims that 75% of the people are not open to the alternative of personalized tickets (de Vrieze, 2016). I hope that Ken is able come with a solution for this problem (caused partly by him) as those robots ruined the fair chance for concerts lovers.
Economist.com. (2017). The war on ticket bots is unlikely to be won. [online] Available at: https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21713869-2016-bots-tried-buy-5bn-tickets-or-10000-minute-ticketmasters-website [Accessed 15 Oct. 2017].
de Vrieze, A. (2016). Mark Yovich (Ticketmaster): “96% van de concertkaartjes wordt niet doorverkocht” – stories – 3voor12. [online] 3voor12. Available at: https://3voor12.vpro.nl/artikelen/overzicht/2016/Februari/Mark-Yovich–Ticketmaster—-96–van-de-concertkaartjes-wordt-niet-doorverkocht-.html [Accessed 15 Oct. 2017].
Hey Annelien, cool article. What I’m curious about is the constant updating in CAPTCHA though. It’s true that bots started catching up with CAPTCHA as time passed, but CAPTCHA was also continuously updated. I think right now most captcha’s only require you to tick a box for “I’m not a robot”, while very rarely asking for extra proof by an image selection test. This is all provided by Google based on machine learning. Of course there are already robots that can beat the new CAPTCHA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsF7enQY8uI) but to use a bot net for ticket buying is very hard to do at the moment I think.