#malbots

Ticket-scapling bots utilize humans to get through CAPTCHAs.

  Lin-Manuel Miranda — “Hamilton” star, creator, certified genius and all-around national obsession — penned an impassioned plea in the New York Times this week asking for help to stop bots from taking over Broadway. Miranda shed light on how scalpers use bots to buy up tickets to plays, operas, concerts and other events in milliseconds, only to resell them for at least double their original price on sites such as StubHub.

As Miranda outlined, this activity is both super profitable and illegal, and apparently profitable enough to be worth it to some to break the law. But, one might wonder,  how are they getting past the captcha — those squiggly lettered snippets specifically designed to thwart robo-buying?

They have a secret weapon: people.

According to the New York Attorney General’s office report that Miranda cites in his op-ed, one way that these bots are getting around the security measures designed to thwart them is by enlisting the help of humans. Some companies do use software, namely optical character recognition (OCR) programs that can convert an image to text — for example, making a scanned page of a book searchable. But the bots also send real-time feeds of the captchas (per Wikipedia, technically a backcronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart")  to have humans solve the puzzles that only humans are supposed to be able to solve.

From the report comes this picture of a somewhat grim career:

“[The] Bots transmit in real-time images of the CAPTCHAs they encounter on Ticketmaster and other sites to armies of “typers,” human workers in foreign countries where labor is less expensive. These typers — employed by companies such as Death by CAPTCHA, Image Typerz, and DeCaptcher — read the CAPTCHAs in real-time and type the security phrases into a text box for the Bot to use to bypass ticket vendors’ defenses and use their sites.”

This is far from a new tactic to get around captchas. In 2004, Cory Doctorow, co-editor at Boing Boing, reported that spammers were using free pornography sites to get people to solve the captchas for them. To unlock a video, a potential viewer would have to solve captchas piped in from other sites such as  Yahoo and Hotmail, which spammers would then use to create oodles of e-mail accounts at a rapid pace to spam people.

Lin-Manuel Miranda calls for action against ticket bots, which have prevented people from getting tickets to his musical_ Hamilton_.

  “They call you Lady Luck, but there is room for doubt” — Frank Loesser, “Guys and Dolls”

Almost a year ago, the curtain rose for “Hamilton” at the Richard Rodgers Theater. Since that day, everyone involved in the production has had many wonderful experiences to cherish — from the performance when we hosted President Obama and the first lady to the heartfelt stories we hear from theatergoers outside the stage door.

But we share one regret: the lack of availability of tickets means that many people who want to see “Hamilton” can’t. Part of this problem, as it is for many Broadway shows, is simple economics: The demand for tickets exceeds the number of seats in the theater on a given night.

But there is another significant factor exacerbating this problem that is unfair to customers, and that lawmakers in Albany can help us solve.

Many would-be customers complain that tickets to their favorite shows, concerts and sporting events are sold out within minutes — if not seconds — after they are posted for sale.

So how is it that you can’t get through to Ticketmaster on the phone or online, and yet resale sites like StubHub or Vivid Seats instantly have tickets available at sky-high prices? Are they luckier than you or your neighbor? Can they dial faster? Is StubHub the lucky Sky Masterson to your hapless Nathan Detroit?

No. The issue is the widespread use of special automated software called “ticket bots” by third-party brokers, which Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, discovered earlier this year during an investigation. His findings are detailed in a report called “Obstructed View: What’s Blocking New Yorkers From Getting Tickets.” Brokers use bots to connect at lightning speed and gobble up as many hot tickets as possible, then offer them on legal resale sites like StubHub.

The investigation confirmed that tens of thousands of tickets to New York events are acquired each year using such software. Brokers who buy tickets using bots substantially mark up the prices — sometimes by more than 1,000 percent — yielding enormous profits.

Incredibly, ticket bots are already illegal under New York law and their use is subject to civil penalties (the attorney general recently announced that large fines were leveled against six brokers). But the markup on resale tickets is so lucrative, earning brokers millions of dollars per year, that they happily risk prosecution and treat civil penalties as the cost of business.

To use another metaphor from “Guys and Dolls”: Big Julie is using loaded dice, and you and I do not have a chance. Tickets are taken out of circulation, punishing people who can’t afford to pay more than face value. The extra money doesn’t provide a better concert or show experience for you, the fan. Instead, it goes straight to the broker’s bottom line.

The problem will persist until we strengthen the existing law and make this recurrent illegal behavior a felony.