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.
According to the 43-count federal indictment (.pdf) unsealed Monday in New Jersey, the defendants set up a nationwide network through which they were able to impersonate thousands of individual ticket buyers, defeating the security and fraud measures that online ticket vendors such as Ticketmaster, Musictoday and Tickets.com put in place to thwart automated ticket buying.
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