Anakela said: "There's a profile of Jeffrey Seller in this upcoming Sunday's NYT; piece is online now. I found many parts of it fascinating, but would love to dissect this for a second:
Early this year, Seller says, a single bot purchased 20,000 “Hamilton” tickets. Even when the brokers’ methods are discovered, he says, “they figure out a new way to hack the system. It’s frustrating, and it’s infuriating.”
The RR seats 1,300, so say that one bot bought up all seats in a performance, that would be slightly over 15 performances where one bot owns all the tickets in the house. So, if bots are such a problem, and they ("they" = Seller, et al) can see enough to be able to see that one bot bought 20,000 tickets, how can they not just turn this bot off/deny the bot access/void the bot tickets? Or is this a case of they can only see that one bot bought 20,000 tickets when numbers are being crunched months later after the fact or something?
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I still don't understand how one bot can buy so many. I read a scalper's Reddit ama and he said that he does use a program but because of ticket limits, he enlists a lot of friends to purchase at same time. They all use the bot program but it doesn't register as the same bot since they have different IP addresses. Even financially, 20k tickets at $150 average price point is 3 million dollars, wouldn't a credit card company put a freeze and who even has 3 million in available credit?