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Wiseguy Tickets Busted After Pocketing Over $25M in Online Ticket Scams

by Caleb Johnson on March 2, 2010 at 05:00 PM

It's no secret that you're paying twice as much to take your kid to see Miley Cyrus because some jerks are scooping up all the tickets and reselling them. But now, a few "Wiseguys" are learning the true cost of this deceptive business. According to Wired, Wiseguy Tickets and Seats owner Kenneth Lowson, co-owner Kristofer Kirsch, chief financial officer Faisal Nahdi, and programmer Joel Stevenson were recently indicted on counts of unauthorized computer access and wire fraud for their part in a massive online ticket buying scam.

The men wrote code that bypassed the security measures of online ticket vendors like Ticketmaster, and purchased thousands of premium seats -- resulting in resell profits of $25 million between 2002 and 2009. They snatched tickets to high-profile shows by Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, as well as seats at major sporting events like the 2006 Rose Bowl. In fact, Lowson allegedly told a co-worker that the company bought 882 out of every 1,000 tickets that the Rose Bowl sold.

In other words, if you were shut out of seeing a concert or game in the last few years, you can probably blame these guys. It's tough for legitimate ticket vendors to stay ahead of the curve when scam artists constantly rewrite code and amass armies of bots to defeat security efforts. Still, there must be some lessons to learn from this indictment. Maybe "face-value" will become a familiar term once again. [From: Wired]

Tags: concert, ethics, hack, scam, ticketmaster, tickets, top, wiseguys tickets, WiseguysTickets

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