Ticketmaster admits it hacked rival company before it went out of business

[Pickles von Brine]

Quote

Ticketmaster has agreed to pay a $10 million criminal fine after admitting its employees repeatedly used stolen passwords and other means to hack a rival ticket sales company.

The fine, which is part of a deferred prosecution agreement Ticketmaster entered with federal prosecutors, resolves criminal charges filed last week in federal court in the eastern district of New York. Charges include violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, computer intrusion for commercial advantage or private financial gain, computer intrusion in furtherance of fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and wire fraud.

In the settlement, Ticketmaster admitted that an employee who used to work for a rival company emailed the login credentials for multiple accounts the rival used to manage presale ticket sales. At a San Francisco meeting attended by at least 14 employees of Ticketmaster or its parent company Live Nation, the employee used one set of credentials to log in to an account to demonstrate how it worked.

Source

Well, this is not something you see everyday. The fact the unnamed employee provided info from a rival company, then got a promotion out of it.  My only question is how did they think they could get away with it? Did they think the business going belly up would cover their tracks? Kinda messed up if you ask me. 

[Senzelian]

That $10 mil fine is not going to put their rival back in business, so it was probably worth it.

[SFFDesigns]

7 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

That $10 mil fine is not going to put their rival back in business, so it was probably worth it.

Exactly. Without a rival, they can probably recoup that pretty quickly too.

[Arrogath]

22 minutes ago, Hymenopus_Coronatus said:

Exactly. Without a rival, they can probably recoup that pretty quickly too.

probably not through the Pandemic, but maybe after

[Jet_ski]

I will go out of my way to not use Ticketmaster. What a bunch of *******.

[thechinchinsong]

Ticketmaster is laughing straight to the bank.

[PlayStation 2]

Not gonna lie, that's a big chad move. Very shitty movie, but also extremely chad at the same time.

[wanderingfool2]

7 hours ago, Jet_ski said:

I will go out of my way to not use Ticketmaster. What a bunch of *******.

The scary thing is how much of a monopoly the have on the sale of tickets, and no government body steps in properly.  It makes it super hard to avoid them.

[wamred]

Yeah, this is crazy. I'm going to make sure I don't let any of my family use Ticketmaster. 

[Actual_Criminal]

Does anyone know who the competitor was?

[trag1c]

Doesn't surprise me seeing how ticketmaster is greasier than a lube shop.  I think the Canadian government and Canadian news organizations have caught them using shady business practices like half a dozen times at this point. 

[wanderingfool2]

5 hours ago, Actual_Criminal said:

Does anyone know who the competitor was?

It was allegedly SongKick.

 

Looking into this a bit more.  Songkick sued in 2017, but due to everything had to close up shop (and sold to Warner).  The ticket sales portion wasn't sold to Warner, and the suit continued to 2018.

 

A quote from the CEO of SongKick at the time

Quote

I’m sad to write that on 31 October, Songkick will bow to pressure from Live Nation and Ticketmaster and complete the shutdown of all ticketing operations (including the design and maintenance of artist webpages) we began earlier this year when Ticketmaster and Live Nation effectively blocked our US ticketing business

The case was settled in 2018, for $110 million and Ticketmaster buying the remaining ticket sales assets.  So effectively TicketMaster successfully succeeded in shutting down their competition.  (That was like 1% of their total revenue they earned in 2019 to regain a monopoly effectively).

 

Honestly, the fact they could settle for $10million fine is ridiculous.  Even including the amount they paid in the lawsuit, it's just the cost of doing business it seems.  ($10 million is really nothing to TicketMaster).  Really there should be jail time for the executives that knowingly did this.

[dalekphalm]

The problem with Ticketmaster and Live Nation is that when buying tickets to more popular artists, there's often no alternative. Even if you use a 3rd party scalping site, they still bought their tickets from Ticketmaster, so TM is still getting their cut, and you're paying more for the shitty scalper to profit from. It's a lose lose situation.

[ToboRobot]

I guess if one were to hack Ticketmaster there would be no repercussions...  

[SPARC]

I knew Ticketmaster was scum, but I didn’t know they were THIS bad. $10 million is nothing to large corporations. Awful.

[PocketNerd]

Yeah like others have pointed out $10million don't do shit for deterrence for Ticketmaster.

 

Actively condoning your employees hacking competitors to extinction? Buh-bye corp! At least, that's what it should be.

[SteveGrabowski0]

If corporations are people they should be jailed when they commit crimes. They get a two year sentence, the company isn't allowed to operate in any form for two years and competitors come and take their market share in that period. Then the criminals have to come back and try to win that market share back in two years.

[wanderingfool2]

30 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

If corporations are people they should be jailed when they commit crimes. They get a two year sentence, the company isn't allowed to operate in any form for two years and competitors come and take their market share in that period. Then the criminals have to come back and try to win that market share back in two years.

The way it should work is there should be a requirement to hand over all emails/communication of who said what and when...then the CEO's, upper management who knowingly promoted/incentivized it should be jailed.  That's the only way to make large companies learn.

 

3 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

The problem with Ticketmaster and Live Nation is that when buying tickets to more popular artists, there's often no alternative. Even if you use a 3rd party scalping site, they still bought their tickets from Ticketmaster, so TM is still getting their cut, and you're paying more for the shitty scalper to profit from. It's a lose lose situation.

I think it was a while back, but they actually tried moving on the scalpers to force the use of the ticketmaster reselling website (to which they took another cut). 

[Zodiark1593]

On 1/8/2021 at 10:57 AM, wanderingfool2 said:

The way it should work is there should be a requirement to hand over all emails/communication of who said what and when...then the CEO's, upper management who knowingly promoted/incentivized it should be jailed.  That's the only way to make large companies learn.

 

 

Will probably just encourage the use of encrypted and ephemeral communications within the company to ensure no evidence is left behind. In what you propose (pursuing criminal charges), the Fifth amendment would apply, allowing the defendant to withhold contents of the mind, which conveniently includes encryption passwords, the only exception being that the encrypted contents are already known to investigators(foregone conclusion).  Honestly, tech is kind of above the law.