These guys built bots that solved CAPTCHAs faster than humans and made $25 MILLION scalping concert tickets

Between 2002 and 2009 two guys named Kenneth Lowson and Kristofer Kirsch ran a company called Wiseguy Tickets that bought up the best seats to almost every big event in America
They paid programmers in Bulgaria about $1,000 a month to build a network of bots that solved Ticketmaster's CAPTCHA, faster than any real person could
The second tickets went on sale, the bots flooded the website and locked up the front rows before a single fan had a chance to get a seat
To look like thousands of different customers, the crew set up hundreds of fake companies, thousands of email addresses and a bank of around 1,000 phone numbers
Lowson and Kirsch even interviewed former staff of the ticket sites to learn how the security worked and hacked their way into some of the source code
Wiseguy grabbed 882 of the 1,000 tickets released for the 2006 Rose Bowl and nearly half the front floor for a Springsteen show at Giants Stadium
All of them went to brokers who flipped the tickets to the public for way higher prices
Over seven years the company moved more than 1.5 million tickets and made over $25 million
The best part is that ticket bots were not even illegal yet, so the FBI reached for a broad computer hacking law to charge them instead
In the end they pleaded guilty, admitted the whole $25 million and got two years of probation with some community service
Lowson said he burned almost all of the money defending himself, while the fourth partner fled the country before the arrests and was never caught