This has massively increased the reach of ticket scalpers, who can target sold-out events in any country, and also allowed them to hide from the authorities of these countries.Īccording to Ken, scalpers using ticket bots tend to base themselves in small countries without much government oversight - countries that are known as tax havens. Now they can be bought from anywhere in the world. Understanding the botsīefore online ticket sales, concert tickets were typically sold over the phone, or through record shops. He explained to Hack how modern scalping works. He now wants to help fans and stop scalpers. Ken Lowson says he's reformed after a hallucinatory encounter with Obi-Wan Kenobi in a Calcutta detox retreat. The US has outlawed bots, the UK is considering the same, the Australian Senate wants similar legislation, and New South Wales says it's going to pass its own.īut there are questions over whether these laws work, and whether the real problem with ticketing goes deeper than bot-armed scalpers. The world's largest ticket seller, Ticketmaster, stopped 6 billion bot attempts last year, at a rate of more than 11,000 per minute. Seven years on from that FBI raid, governments and tickets sellers are still struggling to halt Ken's bot invention. "I made it too fast and too young and it got to my head." "We just took it too far and probably pissed off all the other guys trying to do it."
"We were really good and that was probably our downfall," Ken told Hack. This hyper-charged form of ticket scalping has little in common with the pre-internet era when men in coats sold paper tickets outside of stadiums. The bots grab all the best tickets before human buyers, and then flip them for resale on other sites. The secret of his success was in the servers the FBI confiscated: computer programs, also known as ticket bots, that automate the process of buying tickets online. He was charged with hacking and defrauding ticket sellers like Ticketmaster.
The kid from Arizona was living a wild life of drink, drugs and parties in Los Angeles.
By the time shotgun-wielding FBI agents raided his office, Ken Lowson, a former insurance salesman, had become America's greatest ticket scalper.įrom 2001 to 2010, according to the FBI indictment, his company, Wiseguy, had bought and resold 2.5 million tickets and made more than $25 million in profit.
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