Two guys ran a bot empire that scalped concert tickets for $25M — and it wasn't even illegal yet.
Kenneth Lowson and Kristofer Kirsch ran Wiseguy Tickets from 2002-2009. They paid Bulgarian programmers ~$1k/month to build bots that cracked Ticketmaster's CAPTCHA faster than humans.
The moment tickets dropped, their bots flooded in and locked up front rows before real fans could click.
To avoid detection: hundreds of shell companies, thousands of emails, ~1,000 phone numbers. They even interviewed former ticket site employees to reverse-engineer security systems and accessed source code.
Results: 882 of 1,000 Rose Bowl tickets in 2006. Nearly half the front floor at a Springsteen show. Over 1.5 million tickets moved in 7 years.
All resold to brokers at massive markups.
The wildest part: ticket bots weren't illegal yet. FBI had to use a computer hacking law to prosecute them.
They pleaded guilty, admitted the full $25M, got 2 years probation + community service. Lowson claims he burned almost everything on legal defense. A fourth partner fled the country before arrest and was never caught.
This is what happens when you find a regulatory gap and scale ruthlessly before anyone writes the law.
Kenneth Lowson and Kristofer Kirsch ran Wiseguy Tickets from 2002-2009. They paid Bulgarian programmers ~$1k/month to build bots that cracked Ticketmaster's CAPTCHA faster than humans.
The moment tickets dropped, their bots flooded in and locked up front rows before real fans could click.
To avoid detection: hundreds of shell companies, thousands of emails, ~1,000 phone numbers. They even interviewed former ticket site employees to reverse-engineer security systems and accessed source code.
Results: 882 of 1,000 Rose Bowl tickets in 2006. Nearly half the front floor at a Springsteen show. Over 1.5 million tickets moved in 7 years.
All resold to brokers at massive markups.
The wildest part: ticket bots weren't illegal yet. FBI had to use a computer hacking law to prosecute them.
They pleaded guilty, admitted the full $25M, got 2 years probation + community service. Lowson claims he burned almost everything on legal defense. A fourth partner fled the country before arrest and was never caught.
This is what happens when you find a regulatory gap and scale ruthlessly before anyone writes the law.