4 Charged in Concert Ticket Resale Scheme By JOSEPH PLAMBECK
Federal prosecutors in New Jersey said on Monday that four men operating under the name Wiseguy Tickets had broken into online sites, buying more than one million tickets to some of the country?s most popular musical and sporting events and then reselling them for more than $25 million in profit.
In its 43-count indictment, the prosecutors say the men built a computer network that created thousands of fake accounts and built a program that could outsmart the ticketing software that creates oddly shaped letters intended to require human verification.
The events affected by the scheme cut across a wide swath of the entertainment business, from Hannah Montana concerts to Broadway shows and New York Yankees playoff games. The verification systems of many major online ticket vendors, including Ticketmaster, Telecharge and Major League Baseball, were breached.
The company would search only for those seats that they believed could be sold for a premium, sometimes at more than $1,000 over face value.
?At a time when the Internet has brought convenience and fairness to the ticket marketplace, these defendants gamed the system with a sophisticated fraud operation that generated over $25 million in illicit profits,? Paul J. Fishman, a United States attorney, said in a statement.
Three of the indicted men, Kenneth Lowson, 40, Kristofer Kirsch, 37, and Joel Stevenson, 37, surrendered on Monday. Mr. Lowson is being held until his lawyers can present a bail package to the court, while Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Kirsch were released on bail.
The fourth man, Faisal Nahdi, 36, is out of the country and arrangements are being made for his surrender, according to the United States attorney?s office.
As early as 2005, Ticketmaster, now part of Live Nation Entertainment, contacted Wiseguy about improper ticket buying. In 2008, Ticketmaster contacted the companies hosting Wiseguy?s computers in an effort to stop the use of the automated programs.
