NEWARK (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — The three men who were operating Wiseguy Tickets, Inc. were sentenced connection with their multimillion-dollar scheme to bypass the security mechanisms of online ticket distributors to buy premium tickets in bulk and resell them for a profit, United States Attorney Paul J Fishman announced.
Kenneth Lowson, 41, Kristofer Kirsch, 38, of Los Angeles; had previously plead guilty to wire fraud and exceed authorized access to computers engaged in interstate commerce. Defendant Joel Stevenson, 38, of Alameda, Calif pleaded guilty to exceeding authorized access to computers engaged in interstate commerce. A fourth alleged co-conspirator, Faisal Nahdi, remains at large.
Lowson and Kirsch were each sentenced to two years of probation and 300 hours of community service; Stevenson, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge, was sentenced to one year of probation. Lowson was also ordered to forfeit $1.225 million.
The Wiseguys scheme saw the defendants working with software programmers in Bulgaria to develop a ticket buying 'bot' that would circumvent ticketing software restricts the number of tickets that an individual customer can purchase. The defendants purchased up to 1.5 million tickets, using various aliases and shell corporations as well as fake domain names and thousands of shell email addresses to facilitate their scheme. – CelebrityAccess Staff Writers
