 Now, I know bots are bad, you know bots are bad, everybody knows bots are bad, yet. Some people think they can go ahead, use them, get away with, you know, scouting around the laws, getting some tickets, selling the tickets, making tons of cash money. We're not about that life. We're not about, you know, supporting people who use bots. We only like people buying tickets the right way, and the right way is the non-illegal methods. What's up, guys? Welcome back. My name is Shraze. Here on Thumbs Up, where we talk about buying tickets, selling tickets, making sure that you have all the fun with your tickets. Today, we're talking about something a little bit different. We're gonna go into details about what just happened, what was just announced in the US, specifically surrounding bots. So a couple of things we wanna talk about today. One, what's going on with bots? What are they exactly? How do they work? And how are they used in a ticket master's type setting? So number two, we're gonna talk about the actual rules that are in place specifically within the US, surrounding how they actually legislate and work around dealing with bots and tickets. And then three, we're gonna get into an actual case that has just been brought up, just been announced, FDC has just filed a case using the Bots Act against a group of companies. This is the first time they've actually been able to use the Bots Act. So we're gonna go into all the details about that case. And lastly, just gonna talk about where we're gonna go from here. So strap in, stay tuned, get ready. We're talking about bots. Click the slamer. I do not condone the use of bots whatsoever. This whole video is just for informational purposes only. I not condone or endorse any type of bot type activity, whether that's using any kind of automated programming or anything of the sort I do not condone using any of this when going ahead and buying tickets at all. All right, so first off, what is a bot? Basically, a bot is any kind of scripted program that can be run to be automated. It'll basically go through a set of tasks, repeat itself until it gets to the end of it, and then it can either just end there or it'll then repeat and start all over again. Even just something as simple as just, you know, clicking around on different websites. Another option is something that can be using an API which goes in and checks prices for different things, sees if any of the inventory is available. All these automated softwares that do exist to go ahead and, you know, make life a bit easier. All very innocent and innocuous, very simple stuff. Hey guys, editing Shiraz here. So I was just editing the video and realized I didn't really discuss Ticketmaster bots that well, so I wanted to just dive into that really quickly. So there's two main ones, spinners and drop checkers. So spinners, the way they work is they just go into Ticketmaster, they send in a bunch of requests, they're gonna lock up inventory in a whole bunch of different sections, and then it's up to the bot user to go ahead and actually now decide which ones do they wanna keep and then throw the rest back. Because of the way most ticketing platforms work, once you have your tickets in your cart, you generally have, you know, five, eight, 10 minutes to go ahead and finalize your purchase. So because of that, the spinner bot, it can actually lock up hundreds of seats across the entire venue, giving the user the time to decide which ones they wanna keep and actually check out with, or then just throw back the ones they don't want. So that's number one, that's spinners. Number two, these are drop checkers. They're just kind of constantly monitoring primary secondary market sites to see if any tickets are being released. I've talked about ticket drops before in this channel, but essentially an artist or promoter, they generally hold back a bunch of great seats within the venue, in case they wanna get into, you know, fans or giveaways, contests, they're sponsors, anything like that, they wanna go ahead and give us tickets out, they can do that. But what happens is a lot of times, some of these seats aren't gonna get used and they're gonna end up releasing them back to the public to go ahead and buy them. That's why these drop checker bots, what they're doing, they're just constantly monitoring inventory and see if there's any changes being made, any new seats being released, and if there are and it meets any of their criteria, whether it's in the right section, the right price point on the aisle, whatever the case may be, they're just gonna go ahead and automatically fulfill that purchase and buy those tickets up right away. These bots, they're quite powerful and the worst part is they're very, very readily available. You can go ahead, just do a quick search on Google and you're gonna find hundreds of them and some of them aren't even that expensive, which makes it even worse. And this really kind of propagates the whole problem of using bots in the first place. All right, back to the video. Obviously, ticket brokers, ticket scalpers, they've been around for a long time, even before tickets started being sold over the internet, people were still finding ways to get a whole bunch of tickets, figuring out different ways to skirt around the rules. So they're just getting people line sitters to go ahead, get in line for you, buy the tickets and then sell them back to you for a little profit, having secret side deals with actual ticket retail stores, trying to get some money in that way so you can get the good seats before they actually go on sale, or even when it moved all the way to online, just finding different ways to use bots to jump ahead, bypass captures, just being able to go ahead and rent some spinners which will hold up tons of inventory, let you pick and choose what you like and dump the rest back. Over time, set of activity has grown and it's gone to become quite a bit of a problem. So with all that being said, there were a whole bunch of different things that had come up over the years, specifically back in the early 2000, there was a case against wise guys, you may or may not have heard of them, basically what they did, they used bots, automated ticketing software, and they also had a whole bunch of bypass opportunities to get through Ticketmaster. They found all sorts of different hacks to be able to get through their ticket limit bypasses. They had all these things set up. I'll leave a bit of detail about it in the description down below. They were able to buy up hundreds of thousands of tickets over almost a 10 year period and they were just buying them, selling them for their clients, able to lock up hundreds of tickets, sometimes thousands of tickets for individual events and they were able to pocket in millions and millions of dollars. So they eventually they didn't get caught but it was not for bypassing ticket limits themselves, it was more on the financial side so with wire transfer fraud, legal use of computers, that kind of thing, but nothing specifically related to tickets. All of this to say, different states, they had some of their own legislation, you know, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, they all had their own individual state level legislation but one, it was very difficult to police and two, if you were out of state, you basically just kind of do whatever you wanted. So during the Obama administration in 2016, they were able to actually pass what is known as the BOTS Act, more formally known, the Better Online Ticket Sales Act of 2016. So very simply with the BOTS Act coming into play, it essentially made it illegal to bypass any ticket limits using any type of software. In addition, it ultimately made it illegal to buy or sell tickets that were obtained using these methods to bypass any ticket limits. So essentially, if you weren't using a BOT but you knew someone who did, who was able to obtain tickets, it made it illegal for you to both buy it from them and then also to sell those tickets. The only other thing to note here was that the BOTS Act only applied for events where there were 200 or more tickets available. For any type of smaller venues, this generally would not apply but again, for any event that is that small, you wouldn't even need to apply this because there likely isn't that much demand to get into that event. Now, what the BOTS Act did not do is really have any details over how they were gonna go ahead and enforce this. Because again, it's very difficult to actually go ahead and start combing through data to say, did this person use a BOT to buy these tickets or did this person just go in, buy tickets as a normal fan and then ended up reselling them themselves? Because again, this law did not make it illegal to resell tickets and this is exactly why the Stubhubs and the Seat Geeks and the Vivid Seats and all those guys, they all exist because again, they're supporting the resale market. So again, the BOTS Act, it's limiting people from bypassing ticket limits using software but it's not limiting people from actually going ahead to buy tickets and then resell them. But again, the BOTS Act came in, all was well, everybody rejoiced and then nothing. Obviously new events were being added, tickets were being sold, still felt like it was impossible to get these tickets but concedures had a little bit of hope the use of BOTS would start to slow down. Was that the case though? Hard to say. Obviously people still found it very difficult to buy tickets to hot events. You know, the Taylor Swift and the Rolling Stones and all the other things in between. It was difficult to buy tickets. It's still difficult to buy tickets. It's never going to be easy to buy tickets and the idea of, you know, in the back of your mind thinking, hey, maybe there's BOTS being used here. That doesn't help at all either. With all that being said, we roll on over into 2021. And finally, the BOTS Act gets a hit. Yes, we cut them, we cut the BOTS. We got them, man. So then January 22nd, 2021 rolls around and we get this. FTC brings first ever case using the BOTS Act. Yeah, consumers rejoice. Everyone is so happy the BOTS have been conquered. How many people did they catch? Three. How many tickets did they buy? 150,000. Let's get into the details, shall we? So basically there are three companies who were caught using BOTS to bypass captchas and then also to go ahead and exceed ticket limits. I'll link all the cases down below. Basically, these three individuals, they were caught using two different types of BOTS to go ahead and exceed ticket limits. They ended up buying over 150,000 tickets with revenues in excess of $30 million. Using these different BOTS, they were able to hide their IP addresses, get through all the different captchas, make multiple accounts, use multiple credit cards, use fake names, addresses, emails, all the kind of good stuff that people need to run their very successful BOT business. All in all, they were caught finally, but it was not until much later down the road. All in all, they took in millions of dollars in revenue and also tons of money in profits, but essentially after they got caught, it doesn't make you feel great inside, right? This is just three people. You could say, oh, they're just three bad apples. Everybody else is fantastic, wonderful, excellent. They would never do such a thing, but it's not a good sign. It feels like they were able to do this quite easily to be honest. Imagine if they were even 100 people or 1,000 people doing this. So what I think that the future holds four tickets and ticket BOTS. One, unfortunately, I think BOTS are here to stay. The people who want to use BOTS, whether there are rules or not in place, they're still gonna find a way to use them, abuse them and get away with everything. And this is just unfortunately the way things are. I do think Ticketmaster and other primary markets, they are constantly working on figuring out different ways to increase their security measures, make sure that ticket limits are enforced, try to find a way to get tickets into the hands of consumers, and then just, you know, the general, just being able to have that great, enjoyable experience, make it as easy as possible. They're working hard to try and prevent BOTS from, you know, taking over their entire systems. But again, it's very difficult to do. So it's just gonna be a constant battle between, you know, the primary markets, the BOTS, the people who want tickets, everybody's always fighting to get tickets and unfortunately, there's only so many to go around. With all that being said, I do hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, definitely let me know by hitting the like button down below. Be sure to subscribe, you haven't already, cause great new content's coming out every single week in. See you guys next time.