Meet the man who introduced concert ticket-buying bots

There's a reason you can't secure tickets to a concert by your favourite artist. Ticket-buying bots are faster and stronger than any human. And this guy started it all.

Bots — automated programs that can perform tasks online exponentially faster than us poor meatbags — have been a plague on the concert ticket-buying public for decades now.

A single bot can buy a thousand or more tickets in less than 60 seconds. There are examples of a couple of bots hoovering up 15,000 tickets in a single day. When a hot show goes on sale, it’s estimated that at least 40 per cent of the traffic to the ticketing site is bots. In some cases, that number has been as high as 96 per cent. 

Thousands of these things are online, elbowing you out of the queue, snapping up tickets and then immediately sending them to reseller sites with huge mark-ups. They can scoop up “limit four tickets per person” in less time than it takes you to enter your credit card information.

How do they work? The speed of the bot attack and the volume of bots overwhelm the system, beating out humans the nanosecond sales begin.

A specialist bot creates hundreds or even thousands of accounts with, say, Ticketmaster or somehow manages to take over existing accounts by guessing passwords or cracking credentials. As everyone is waiting for tickets to go on sale, the buying bot (bots plural; there is never just one) simulates many humans queueing up to buy.

When sales begin, it uses a script to burn through the purchasing process. Programs known as “expediting bots” can open 100 purchasing windows simultaneously and proceed right to checkout. Others just drop tickets into a cart, making them unavailable to everyone else. The tickets will sit there until they can be purchased and then moved to a resale site. That tactic is known as “denial of inventory.”

Some use credit card fraud to buy. Others figure ways around the “X tickets per person” rule. Bots are run by ticket resellers, hospitality companies and large corporations looking to secure seats for clients. Others are part of a criminal enterprise. And more than a few are operated by individuals. A quick Google search will reveal sites that will sell you a ticket-buying bot for between US$300 and $900. I even found a few that charge less than US$100. Other sites will teach you how to build your own.

Who’s responsible for this scourge? If we go back in history, it’s a former insurance salesman from Arizona named Ken Lowson, a ticket reseller who found a teenage programming whiz in Bulgaria in 2001. Together, they developed an automated concert ticket-buying program that they continually refined to be faster and more ruthless when it came to acquiring tickets.