Three individuals based in California were sentenced on probation for making more than USD 25 M reselling illegally bought tickets to concerts and sporting events by hiring cheap Bulgarian programmers.

Kenneth Lowson, 41, and Kristofer Kirsch, 38, both of Los Angeles, each pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and exceed authorized access to computers engaged in interstate commerce, for which they received two years probation and 300 hours of community service.

Joel Stevenson, 38, of Alameda, Calif., pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of exceeding authorized access to computers engaged in interstate commerce and was sentenced to one year of probation.

The three were involved in a company named Wiseguy Tickets, and had for years an inside track on some of the best seats in the house at many events. including Broadway productions, Bruce Springsteen and Hannah Montana concerts and TV tapings of Dancing with the Stars.

The ring of hackers working for Wiseguy Tickets achieved that by cracking security measures at Ticketmaster and other major vendors by hiring programmers in Bulgaria.

By working with the Bulgarian programmers, California-based Wiseguy Tickets sidestepped a technology known as CAPTCHA, which required users to read, then retype, distorted images of letters and numbers to buy tickets. The Bulgarians developed a bot, which successfully deceived the mechanism.

As a result, the bots flooded the vendor sites and bought hundreds of choice tickets in split-second transactions.