How the guy behind the 1st ever ticket bot made $2.3 million from a U2 tour

While investigating the skyrocketing costs of concert tickets, Vice news talked to one of the most successful ticket scalpers in history to find out what is at the root of such an enduring issue, and why it won’t go away.

On Wednesday’s Vice Special Report: Sold Out: Ticketmaster and the Resale Racket, they spoke with Ken Lowson, who is considered to be the inventor of the first ticket bot and ticket scalper royalty when he was running his company, Wiseguy Tickets.

“I made more money than I could spend,” Lowson said of his time in the scalping business. “In a sentence, I was living a rock-star life. Everybody in the office was partying. It was painkillers and alcohol at night, and it was Adderall in the morning. And all the other ticket brokers, well they treated me like the king.”

The show described Lowson as being one of the first people on a national scale who could get tickets to any event nationwide, which he then resold to other professional scalpers, thus making him “the king scalper.”

Lowson said he teamed up with a teenaged Bulgarian programmer who “turned out to be the best coder in all of the ticket business,” and they spent 15 years building a ticket bot, which could do things like circumvent CAPTCHA codes.

Erez Liebermann, the former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, estimated that Wiseguy made over $25 million in profits during the three years they were being tracked by authorities.

And the biggest money-maker for Lowson during that run was the band U2’s 2005 Vertigo tour, during which the group promised fan club members the opportunity to buy tickets first. A $40 membership fee got fans a special code to purchase up to four tickets.

“Well, I bought $200,000 worth of codes with two credit cards or three credit cards,” Lowson revealed.

The band took heat for the problem and even publicly apologized at the Grammys while promising they would drop the cost on all the $150 seats. That’s when Lowson said he “got a second round” and went in and bought up all of those tickets too. In total, he said his company made a $2.3 million profit from that tour.

“I really didn’t remember giving the fans a second thought. I was a selfish drug addict, alcoholic. I only cared about myself,” Lowson said. “So no, that didn’t go through my head when I was like that. It was only afterward.”

Eventually, the FBI raided the Wiseguy Tickets office in February of 2009, which indirectly led to the BOTS Acts of 2016 getting passed through Congress. Although that ultimately just encouraged software developers to come up with more savvy alternative ways to get around the system.

As for Lowson, he ended up with probation over prison time and went on to try other things with his life, but eventually got pulled back into the ticket business which he still works in today, now with his son Drake along for the ride.

“I made the decision to change from the most successful scalper in history to, ‘I’m going to use what I know to help fans,’” Lowson said about a system he built to help give fans passwords, scalper secrets, hints, tips “and everything that pros know.”

The Vice special also dove into the more recent Taylor Swift concert ticket debacle, which has resulted in fans suing Ticketmaster. It also touched on a hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee that focused on competition in the ticketing and live entertainment industry, with the conclusion being that there could still be fines and even the breaking up of monopolies.

Vice said they reached out to Ticketmaster and Live Nation for an interview, but the companies denied their request.