Indicted Fraudsters Thwart reCAPTCHA, Profit $25M

1 March 2010

"A ring of ticket brokers has been indicted in connection to an elaborate hacking scheme that used bots and other fraudulent means to purchase more than 1 million tickets for concerts, sporting events and other events...The defendants made more than $25 million in profits from the re-sale of the tickets between 2002 and 2009...Ticketmaster used various means to try to thwart Wiseguy’s operation, at one point switching to a service called reCAPTCHA, which is also used by Facebook. It’s a third-party CAPTCHA that feeds a CAPTCHA challenge to a site’s visitors. When a customer tries to purchase tickets, Ticketmaster’s network sends a unique code to reCAPTCHA, which then transmits a CAPTCHA challenge to the customer...But the perpetrators were able to thwart this as well..."