Four Computer Hackers Broke in Concert Ticket Sites

Four men were accused for purchasing and reselling more than one million tickets to various concerts and sport matches with a help of modern computer programs. Kenneth Lowson, Kristofer Kirsch, Faisal Nahdi and Joel Stevenson used a computer program to bypass protection tools that control the number of tickets that one person can buy. Usually an individual can buy four tickets to one event. The software created by these four men is able to impersonate individual ticket buyers. As a result, ticket brokers were able to get more tickets and then resell them to individual persons.

The most popular events were concerts by Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews and Hannah Montana. Also a few baseball and football matches. It was estimated that the total profit of the creators of this software may reach $29 million.

The charges include conspiracy, unauthorized computer access and wire fraud. The latter one holds a maximum prison sentence of 20 years per count.

Buying tickets online usually include a type of challenge-response test called CAPTCHA used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. However, the defendants were able to bypass this by creating databases of answers ahead of time. Besides, they were purchasing tickets of the best seats because the program was completing transactions faster than ordinary ticket buyers who were doing it manually. Lowson, Kirsch, Nahdi and Stevenson are also accused of using credit card numbers and email addresses of their friends and acquaintances to hide the identity of the ticket buyers. Finally, the tickets have been sold for ticket brokers and the average price per ticket was reaching from $30 to even $ 1,000.

This occasion has brought many issues to discuss. Some people claim that the only crime the guys have made was breaking the limit of buying more than 4 tickets per person. However, this might be the thing of the utmost importance as this limit was made so that every fan would have a chance to get a ticket of its favorite performer, band or team.

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