Frustrated Taylor Swift fans battle ticket bots and Ticketmaster

For years, computer software has been used to harvest “hot-ticket” items, which are then typically resold at inflated prices, but the focus tended to be on niche and collectible goods such as limited-edition trainers and luxury handbags. For those not willing to spend money for the chance to spend money on sneakers, there are other options. Self-starters can code bots themselves, and there are open-source bots available on GitHub. But for those without coding knowledge, these aren’t viable solutions.

When a bad actor is operating with a bot for the sole purpose of doing financial damage to an entity, then that comes into an unlawful category. Resy has a data-driven feature called Notify, which puts diners on a waiting list for a restaurant. (OpenTable and SevenRooms added similar features to compete.) Using it is a little like buying a fistful of lottery tickets. Diners add themselves to lots of restaurants’ Notify lists for a certain night with the hope of scoring just one.

Several days after Sleep Token fans dealt with a presale code fiasco, people are now upset at how the band has chosen to deal with ticket scalpers and bots. So observed John Breyault, the vice president of public policy, telecommunications, and fraud at the consumer advocacy-focused National Consumers League, over email. There is even a reseller market for the bots themselves too, with others selling access to the tools for a profit, as sometimes the bot developers limit access with keys that they only release a few hundred at a time.

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Similarly, Ms. Lane Fox, a British e-commerce pioneer, member of Parliament and Twitter board member, blamed a “rogue employee” for a series of follower purchases spanning more than a year. “We continue to fight hard to tackle any malicious automation on our platform as well as false or spam accounts,” Ms. Binns said. The real Jessica Rychly is a Minnesota teenager with a broad smile and wavy hair. When she goes on Facebook or Twitter, she sometimes muses about being bored or trades jokes with friends.

According to the office of Representative Paul D. Tonko (D-NY), the bill’s sponsor in the House, 50 percent of all web traffic is generated by some form of bot. Indeed, without proper enforcement mechanisms measures like the Stopping Grinch Bots Act are destined to languish — that’s assuming they even get signed into law in the first place. This concern, highlighted by Breyault, is based on recent history. “While both the BOTS Act and the Stopping Grinch Bots Acts are important consumer protection bills, we would be the first to acknowledge that they aren’t silver bullets to the bots problem,” he said.

• Just like the sneakers and game consoles they’re designed to buy, these apps are offered only in a limited supply to a lucky few buyers.
• The only way to confidently spot the worrisome patterns is to look across a broad network of merchants.
• Cyber AIO updates itself every three days with new workarounds and fixes for paying customers.
• U.S. lawmakers are giving fans a spark of hope they could buy event tickets at more affordable prices.
• Reports abound of scalping rings in the United States and the United Kingdom scooping up thousands of Sony Sony PlayStation 5 (PS-5) units on the day they were released.

By around 2015, the site had 20,000 people appearing for major releases even though they only had a few hundred pairs of shoes. Bodega started offering web raffles, but people deployed bots for that, too. Employees had to manually check each winner so no one was securing an unfair share of shoes.

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Imperva, a cybersecurity company, said some of their customers which include major retailers face a perfect Grinch bot storm with the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge in online shopping, and America’s supply chain crisis. In January, the percentage of restaurants on Resy that charged cancellation fees had grown more than fourfold from pre-pandemic levels. Another reseller, PerceptiveWash44, told me that he makes reservations while watching TV. He was standing outside the break room at the West Coast hotel where he works as a concierge. “It’s just a way to pass the time.” Last year, he made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations.

Economists call that socially wasteful behavior, or rent-seeking behavior. I try to emphasize to my students the difference between value bots for buying online creation strategies and value capture. And a lot of this stuff is about capturing from a fixed pie, or even shrinking the pie.

The new legislation would also give state Attorney General Dana Nessel more tools to help address the issue—namely by allowing her to file civil litigation in a Michigan courtroom. As a result, some people are reacting by making bots part of their shopping toolkit — with 17% admitting they resorted to using one in the last year. Scalper usage ChatGPT is most common amongst Gen Z and millennial consumers, with 24% and 27% respectively admitting to using one over the last 12 months. Even 5% of over 65s say they use a bot to get what they want online. Bot attackers have solved traditional anti-bot defenses and Captchas. They can buy solver services that cost less than a penny per solution.

Why Sleep Token Fans Are Upset

OpenTable charged restaurants a monthly fee, plus a dollar for every guest seated. Last year, he invested in an A.I.-powered reservation platform called SevenRooms, which most people haven’t heard about because it’s been designed for diners not to know it exists. The Better Online Ticket Sales Act, known as the BOTS Act, passed in 2016, made it illegal for ticket buyers to use bots to circumvent online ticket restrictions, or to sell tickets purchased using bots on the secondary market.

So who are the resellers, mercenaries, and hustlers who provide Appointment Trader with prime tables? Some are people who sit with OpenTable or Resy pulled up on their laptops every morning, amassing reservations in various names. Some are kids who borrow their parents’ Amex black cards, telephone Amex’s Centurion concierge, and book hard-to-get tables that are set aside for card users. The chef Eric Ripert, of Le Bernardin, widely considered one of the best restaurants in the world, told me that it’s not uncommon for callers to scream at and even threaten his reservationists. In May, 2021, a thirty-three-year-old software engineer named Jonas Frey couldn’t get a reservation to renew his driver’s license at the Nevada D.M.V., so he built a Web site to solve the problem. “I thought, ‘How is it possible that I can’t pay for a spot in line?

Sony might only be able to ship 15 million units, instead of 16 million, but they’re all going to find their way to someone’s living room eventually. Retailers send stock out the door almost as soon as it arrives with little effort to stop cook groups or other resellers from grabbing multiple consoles. There’s no real way to directly prevent the groups from skirting purchasing limits.

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Instead of human net surfers, these bad bots generated nearly half of all web traffic. And what’s the harm in using a bot, sourced via a friend or a quick search on social media to access the bot that means you get to see your favorite artist live? It’s very easy to become detached from the bigger picture when sitting behind the safety of a screen.

Since they started their Twitter account, the Supreme Saint’s fame has only grown. A while back, Matt and his dad took a trip to Chicago, and Matt tweeted about it from the Saint account. The manager at Nike’s Jordan store saw the tweet and invited them up to play basketball at a secret court above the shop. The store manager didn’t even know who was coming to the secret court.

Gov. Katie Hobbs signed legislation that could prevent bots from buying tickets and regulate resale tickets

Mr. Leal, who has bought at least 150,000 followers from Devumi in recent years, is one of at least dozens of customers who work in the adult film industry or as escorts, according to a review of Devumi records. High follower counts are also critical for so-called influencers, a budding market of amateur tastemakers and YouTube stars where advertisers now lavish billions of dollars a year on sponsorship deals. According to data collected by Captiv8, a company that connects influencers to brands, an influencer with 100,000 followers might earn an average of $2,000 for a promotional tweet, while an influencer with a million followers might earn $20,000. Everyone wants to be popular online.Some even pay for it.Inside social media’s black market. Meanwhile, instant sell-outs for high-demand Denver shows from artists such as Pretty Lights and Maggie Rogers have forced some fans onto the secondary and third-party markets, where prices can balloon to many times the price set by the artist.

The Swift fiasco also reignited criticism of Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s largest concert promoter. The two companies merged in 2010, prompting fears that the resulting company would have a stranglehold on ticket sales and other parts of the music business. Signed into law in 2016, the BOTS Act gives the government the authority to crack down on those who misuse bots — software applications that are programmed to run automated tasks online — to buy large amounts of tickets for profit. These brokers often run ticket bots that automatically suck up huge swaths of tickets as soon as they go on sale.

After several hours of waiting, they managed to get tickets to one of the Arlington shows. As word about the bots spread across forums, more computer-savvy sneakerheads jumped in. Botmakers also began collaborating on work-­arounds when sneaker companies redesigned their sites or changed their checkout proce­dures. All the botmakers started with Nike but, pretty soon, with Supreme being so elusive, everyone was going after it too.

Netacea conducted this survey in collaboration with independent B2B research specialist Coleman Parkes. The businesses surveyed had turnovers ranging from $350 million to over $7 billion. A New York law last year made it a misdemeanor to use bots to buy up tickets to in-demand events, and Congress passed a crackdown on the federal level. But Schumer pointed out that there isn’t any similar law when it comes to sought-after products. The Retail Industry Leaders Association said many stores have policies that monitor and cap the amount of purchases of high-demand products both in the stores and online. “The exchanges have deliberately looked the other way when there are fraudulent sites and mobile apps that become part of that exchange,” he claims.

All these accounts belong to customers of an obscure American company named Devumi that has collected millions of dollars in a shadowy global marketplace for social media fraud. Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million Twitter followers, a New York Times investigation found. In 2017 Uber sued one of its advertising agencies for charging it for ads that were not seen by real people or placed on real websites. The case started when Uber pulled all online advertising and discovered barely any drop in app installs or sales. Some claim online ads target people who already plan on buying that product or service.

“No one will take you seriously if you don’t have a noteworthy presence,” said Jason Schenker, an economist who specializes in economic forecasting and has purchased at least 260,000 followers. Most of Devumi’s best-known buyers are selling products, services or themselves on social media. They bought followers because they were curious about how it worked, or felt pressure to generate high follower counts for themselves or their customers. “Everyone does it,” said the actress Deirdre Lovejoy, a Devumi customer. The Times reviewed business and court records showing that Devumi has more than 200,000 customers, including reality television stars, professional athletes, comedians, TED speakers, pastors and models. In most cases, the records show, they purchased their own followers.

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Instead, the company’s efforts are focused on identifying and suspending accounts that violate Twitter’s spam policies. In December, for example, the company identified an average of 6.4 million suspicious accounts each week, she said. In real life, Devumi is ChatGPT App based in a small office suite above a Mexican restaurant in West Palm Beach, Fla., overlooking an alley crowded with Dumpsters and parked cars. The fake account remained dormant until last year, when it suddenly began retweeting Devumi customers continuously.

The Kasada report highlights primary shifts in bot operations compared to previous quarters. The primary goal of the Quarterly Threat Report is to equip cybersecurity and threat intelligence professionals with the critical information needed to understand and counteract current attack vectors. The Cyber Express is a handbook for all stakeholders of the internet that provides information security professionals with the latest news, updates and knowledge they need to combat cyber threats. This leads to what’s known as the Eliza Effect, a human being’s tendency to assign human characteristics to software.

If there is a person who keeps Shopify employees awake at night, it’s probably Lucas Titus, a 19-year-old who started college in London this month. Shopify uses different techniques to prevent bots, including puzzles and trivia questions that are difficult for an automated bot to solve. It has also taken steps to prevent transactions when a shopper’s checkout path follows the shortcuts used by bots. The store had no website, so anticipation for major releases was built in person, said Mr. Gordon, who owns the store with Oliver Mak and Dan Natola. Sneakerheads would travel from New York and Montreal and wait in long lines to get the latest design. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. BOSTON — When Bodega, a streetwear shop in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, released a hyped, limited-edition New Balance 997S sneaker in 2019, the entire stock sold out online in under 10 minutes.

“I don’t know why they’d take my identity — I’m a 20-year-old college student,” Mr. Dodd said. “I’m not well known.” But even unknown, Mr. Dodd’s social identity has value in the influence economy. At prices posted in December, Devumi was selling high-quality followers for under two cents each. Sold to about 2,000 customers — the rough number that many Devumi bot accounts follow — his social identity could bring Devumi around $30. Several Devumi customers acknowledged that they bought bots because their careers had come to depend, in part, on the appearance of social media influence.

So, this has become a major concern for many businesses today,” observed Rieniets, adding that cybercrime-as-a-service is also a contributing factor. On May 30, bot defense developer Kasada released its automated threats quarterly report for January through March 2024. The report shows a strategic shift toward more organized and financially motivated online fraud activities. It illustrates how adversaries use a blend of existing and new solver services and advanced exploit kits to bypass traditional bot mitigation tools effectively. Artificial intelligence is behind a significant surge in sophisticated bad bot traffic, which went from bad to worse in the first quarter of this year.

Retail bots are “quite easy to buy … You can Google them,” he added. A basic retail bot can be picked up for £10, while some cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds. Platt said his firm had seen spikes in retail bot activity targeting unexpected items including home exercise and gym equipment and cars. Shoppers started to encounter error messages as they tried to pay for the shoes. Ahead of a special release, the New Balance 990v3 to celebrate Bodega’s 15th anniversary, the boutique and Shopify had devised a few obstacles to slow the bots down. The first was to place the product on a brand-new website with an unguessable address — analogwebsitewrittenonpaper.com.

• He wrote a basic automation script to submit 50,000 entries into a sneaker raffle.
• Platt said his firm had seen spikes in retail bot activity targeting unexpected items including home exercise and gym equipment and cars.
• Several senators told CBS News they would support federal legislation that limits the profit sellers can make on the ticket resale market.
• Retailers must detect such anomalies at lightning speed to foil the scalpers.
• Last year, he made more than a thousand reservations at the city’s trendiest restaurants; he claims to have cozied up to the owners and managers, who set aside tables for him.

Period.” Similarly, Nike updated its own shopping app so that buyers can get sneakers via the (supposedly bot-proof) app. Yet the trials of in-store shopping seem minor compared with those of the web drops. The ecommerce home­page of Supreme’s website is simply a series of narrow rectangular photos showing colors and patterns. Clicking on one takes you to the item from which said photo is a sample.

As the sneaker resale market continues to thrive, Business Insider is covering all aspects of how to scale a business in the booming industry. From how to acquire and use the technology to the people behind the most popular bots in the market today, here’s everything you need to know about the controversial software. Though bots are notoriously difficult to set up and run, to many resellers they are a necessary evil for buying sneakers at retail price. The software also gets around “one pair per customer” quantity limits placed on each buyer on release day. In 2022, Justin and Hailey Bieber were politely turned away by Carbone when they showed up without a reservation. In February, Hailey and her entourage had dinner at 4 Charles, after a private reservationist named Nicky DiMaggio secured them a table.

For example, fraudsters can make unauthorized purchases and redeem loyalty points with these stolen accounts. Given how inexpensively and easily they can obtain stolen customer accounts online in marketplaces and private Discord and Telegram communities, they can make enormous profits, he explained. On the surface scalper bot activity is fraudulent, with bot users skipping the online queue to make a purchase faster than any human can.

But their comments are echoed in reviews on Glassdoor, where some former employees said that Mr. Calas was uncommunicative and demanded that they install monitoring software on their personal devices. Mr. Calas, who is 27, grew up in South Florida, where as a teenager he learned web design and built sites for local businesses, according to earlier versions of his personal web page available on the Internet Archive. Study their group behaviour, and incriminating patterns begin to emerge. After The Times contacted Ms. Greiner, Mr. Pallen said he had “experimented” with the company but “stopped using it long ago.” A lawyer for Ms. Greiner said she had asked him to stop after learning of the first purchases.