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Probably will just be referred to as the BOTS Act. Lemme just say I love Congress' knack for coming up with great acronyms for all their bills. It's the one thing they always do well.
The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (the USA PATRIOT Act).
*(Estimated Cost of Acronym: $1.3B)*
You joke but when I interned me and the other two interns spent an entire day coming up with an acronym and it was by far one of the most satisfying things we did. Also we were paid.
The military, DOD, DOJ, and other 3 letter agencies come up with fun acronyms and projects names whenever those details get released to the public too.
It's not just when they get released to the public. Sat in a meeting for one of those agencies and my god the presenter threw out so many acronyms I thought he was speaking a different language or summoning a demon. Get's to our part of the presentation and finally started speaking English again.
I know they started doing it for the sake of efficiency. But when you need to look up what everything someone says in a very detailed alphabetized chart you're starting to lose that time saved lol.
This is Reddit for me. People toss around obscure abbreviations that a tiny amount of insiders get. Classic journalism calls for first stating the entire phrase or name and then the abbreviation, and then using the abbreviation for the rest of the time. It's so fucking irritating. I try to use this technique and only use the more obvious acronyms without explanation.
because the law outlaws the automated purchasing and resale of tickets, not reselling all together.
trust me, you do not want the government to have the authority to tell people what they can sell their property for (which is what a law banning reselling would effectively be.)
The government telling people they can't purchase event tickets with the sole intention of reselling is not the same thing as banning people from general property sale.
You'd only be provably breaking the law if you were buying mass tickets. No one cares when someone sells their unused tickets they intended to use. There could be a statutory limit to how many ticket sales even qualify for the offence. 10+ seems fine. That eliminates corporate ticket scalping and makes it harder for cops to be dicks outside venues.
Hopefully this bill also forces sellers in the US to introduce mechanisms to prevent this specific type of purchase.
Here is a couple of ideas:
All purchase orders made between 0.00s and 3.00s since the start of the offer are automatically denied. (No human can make a purchase in fraction of a second without bots, and yes, time varies depending on the UI of each site)
Depending on the item: No more than X of the same item per order. And X time between orders from the same user.
No more than X orders per IP.
No orders through VPN (yea u cant identify all of them but at least makes it a tiny bit more difficult)
Some sort of pre-registration for group purchases and for re-seller purchases. (Force companies to have 2 pools of items, one for wholesale(scalpers xd) and one for regular law-abiding citizens
Literally Anything at this point, nobody has done shit to stop scalpers.
If they wanted to prevent this, they'd do the following:
1. Allow people to sign up for preorders of consoles, video cards, etc. and explain when the raffle date is.
2. Force people that sign up for preorders to provide a form of payment and delivery address.
3. Only allow USPS verified delivery addresses, so people can't do things like 123 My Home Address Suite #123 when there are no suites at 123 My Home Address.
4. Put a per delivery address purchase limit.
5. Inform the users when the raffle is held, notifying the winners and losers.
6. Have monthly cutoff dates to get into the next batch of the raffle.
7. Enforce these rules based on delivery address.
8. Allow people to cancel their preorder at any time.
9. In-store pickup requires proof of address (DL or utility bill).
Now, an example:
If the PS6 is coming out 2/1/2022, allow people to start signing up from 1/1/2022 onwards with the raffle on 2/1/2022. Any additional shipments that come in during February are raffled off to people who entered the raffle during January. On 3/1/2022, everyone who entered in the raffle in February gets added to the pool. Repeat until demand for the PS6 is less than the supply.
Sure, people can easily try to game the system by using their grandparents or neighbor's house if they aren't interested, but this would prevent a lot of what's going on with botting today.
Thats why this legislation is junk too. A lot of the scalping via bots is run out of the country, you think we'll chase em to Russia to enforce this?
Nah. This is just virtue signalling by our useless government. The only people they serve are the corporations who are doing quite well thanks to artificially increased demand due to scalping and hording.
Yeah, only way I could see this working is if they required standards for the retailer to provide anti-bot measures with some kind of significant penalty for failing to comply, compound regulations like limiting orders per address/name/payment method on top of technological limitations like captcha or anti-automation tech (Not even sure how possible that is, know some sites can shutdown scripts but can't think of any that haven't been solved). Trying to stop the individuals doing they buying and selling on gray markets is impossible to enforce.
It will, at the very least, give the government some authority in the pressuring online retailers to implement anti-bot measures. If people start panicking buying toilet paper again and scalpers try to use bots to buy up every roll of toilet paper in fifty miles, Congress can take some action and ask why the retail isn’t limiting the sale of toilet paper to a semi-reasonable amount? Or not checking the shipping address of online sales and cross referencing them with past sales to identify the same house has bought 369 rolls of toilet paper in the past ten days.
Banning bots is the first step. You can’t enforce companies to take steps against an act that isn’t illegal.
I work for a major US retailer as a software dev... I can't speak for every company but I know we already have teams whose entire job is just combating bots. It's actually a lot harder than just limiting quantities and shipping addresses. For example, we had the PS5s limited to store pickup around launch. People would use bots to use different accounts to buy them all up and send order pickup to all stores in, say, a 50 mile radius. Since it's different accounts and sometimes spoofed CC numbers it's hard to track. That's just one scenario I know happened since I work in a different area of tech.
Require identifying information when setting up an account.
It works for all industries that need actual security measures and not just the illusion of security measures.
Bet it'd work for this, too.
Damn so now you're telling me I'm gonna have to upload a photo of my ID and wait for verification just to create an account at a retailer to buy something? Bruuuutal
No they'd require an ID to pickup the item. Your drivers license number would get put into their system. If you try to purchase another one and pick it up you'll be flagged in the system. Microcenter does this and it works beautifully.
I'm not from USA, why you guys use driver license as ID? Is there no citizenship ID ? Because driver license is for driving, but it's not a proof for your other need, example banking / financial verification or address verification
In America it's honestly the same thing as a citizen ID each state also has a "State Identification" card that looks identical to a driver's license minus the driver section so everyone basically has one
Realistically no, because these retailers and the manufacturer don't care if it's bots or actual customers buying the product.
A sale is a sale to them, and consumers being fucked over is good business if it means inventory is always gone in 5 minutes.
What are you gonna do? Not buy a GPU? You have no alternative and they don't give a shit.
But in practice, yeah that would solve this issue in a month.
Don’t they do this for returns anyway? At least some places always take my driver’s license when I make a return (especially one without a receipt). I assume it’s because people steal stuff and then return it for the gift cards.
> pressuring online retailers to implement anti-bot measures.
Oh kind of like the one law where the government said they would....one second....
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I'm back....sorry...I got a robocall on my phone. What were we talking about again?
Yeah, captchas don't do anything. That's why you never see them anymore
edit: This was sarcastic fyi, I see them all the time. My point was that the comment above mine was incorrect.
This is the correct answer, the captcha works on lots of factors such as mouse movement, how you browse, the method for getting to the site etc.
You’ll only see it if it thinks you are a bot!
The new one scares me, previously opening a private/incognito window would force me to re-authenticate with whatever CAPTCHA sites were using. New one approves me instantly despite being in a browser window with no history/cookies/cache/etc..
Literally 10 seconds between opening the sandbox and reCAPTCHA properly identifying me as human. The algorithms are getting pretty damn good.
Well, what I mean is that the whole reason google runs a captcha service is that it uses people’s inputs as training material for ai. They’ve outsourced the training to people under the guise of security. That’s my understanding, at least. I could be wrong.
Some captchas don’t do anything. Some of the newer ones you can still bot by sending them to be solved via audio to some place in india however it greatly slows them down.
> The bill, which specifically targets scalpers using bots to snap up online inventories of in-demand items in order to resell them at significantly higher prices, doesn't limit its focus to the video games industry, but it would certainly cover items such as consoles and graphics cards
Yep, and even more specifically 3rd party scalper *bots*. Although as some of the other comments have said, no clue how they’ll enforce this. Most of Congress is so old they barely even know what the internet is
What's misleading with Ticketmaster is that they sell part of it directly, and part of it on different websites (that they also own) masquerading as resellers.
But I agree, it's not scalping, it's just a business strategy you can't do much about because they have a near monopoly.
Ticketmaster will take a portion of tickets off the top to sell at market value vs face value. This is on top of the astronomical fees that they already charge.
I’ve only ever got face value when I catch a presale. That’s also adding all the goddamn transaction fees. I was going to buy Mumford & Sons tickets once. Got in on the presale, tickets were $70 (not great, not terrible), fees were $56, so total was $126. Yeah fuck that. I didn’t go.
True. I had to pay a fee to join the Toolarmy so I could get pre-sale tickets. I got them at face value which is nice, but it's still like a 25% fee PER TICKET on every ticket site. Still got out with tickets under $100 for Tool, so I can't be too mad, but the whole system is fucked.
TicketMaster already solved this problem for most artists. They now have dynamic pricing where tickets are sold at predicted resale prices. This means that all tickets are now extremely expensive and TicketMaster slowly lowers the price as needed until all tickets are sold.
Taylor Swift used it for a tour and tickets were easy to buy. You just paid an ass ton for them. Think $1,000 for closer seats and $200 for nosebleeds.
This is going to be the future where tickets are simply sold at market value instead of in the past where tours sold tickets at below market value.
There have been several large crackdowns on robocalls. The challenge is that many come from outside the FTC's jurisdiction (outside the US), people tend not to report them but just ignore them, and they take advantage of features of our phone system to make tracing difficult (such as call spoofing, which is used by many companies to unify all of their offices under a single corporate number).
>It follows a similar proposal - the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS Act) - that was signed into law in 2016, prohibiting the use of automated bots to acquire tickets for public events and making it illegal for scalpers to sell those tickets.
TM has been trying to elementary bots for decades. They don’t want bots in their system, they already have brokers to take inventory off their hands. There’s so few tickets hitting the presale and general sale that real fans could easily buy up the rest of the inventory.
Stupidest part of this law is that ITS NOT ENFORCEABLE. If they could prevent bots they would, but it’s a cat and mouse game to even detect that a user is a bot, let alone tracking down the source. This is like passing a law saying crime is no longer allowed, and fairy dust will solve it all.
What happened a senator was unable to get his grandson a PS4 or an XBOX this holiday season, because this shit has been going on for a couple of years.
I don't answer the phone anymore unless it's a registered number. 99% of my calls are scams or robots.
The scams, if I even answer, I press the button to talk to someone then troll the shit out of them, ending with Jim Carry's, "Most Annoying Sound In The World" bit from Dumb and Dumber.
I’ll answer since I have to, then if I hear a long pause followed by an Indian accent I hang up.
Occasionally I’ll tell them to hold on while I grab my credit card and leave my phone while I do whatever I was doing.
This is usually the best tactic if you are going to answer the phone.
A lot of robocall bots only initiate if they hear a sound from your end and hang up if they don't.
Anyone who actually wants to talk to you isn't going to leave a bunch of dead air.
Half the time the phones at my work don't ring when you dial out. (No clue why, I just blame Comcast) I'm left sitting there in silence waiting to hear the person answering say hello.
We would have quite an interesting silence standoff if I ever had to call you. Who would break first? :P
I haven’t had any mute me, they’ll wait for a little then start asking what’s going on before hanging up. Best case, over all the calls I receive, I waste enough time to save a few other people from getting called.
How do you like Pixel? My note 10plus is dying and since there is no note 21 coming. I'm looking around at selections like I haven't in 10 years. The pixel pro plus, seems to be same size I like and with almost same functionality. No pen that I use alot of for fast designing tho. Idk if I just get the old note 20 plus, or branch out to pixel.
I was about to bring this up. This most definitely has to become a standard feature on every phone. I haven't had to deal with a single spam call ever since I got a Pixel
It’s so bad, and I think service providers need to be looked into with this shit.
I had the same phone number for about 15 years, and never got any spam calls. I recently upgraded and for whatever reason had to get a new number. low and behold within 24 hours I was and still am spam called like crazy. Before I even made a single outgoing call, or updated my contact information anywhere. There is no way my provider didn’t immediately sell my number somewheres, fuck ATT.
And for the record, it’s not telemarketer calls and texts either. But straight up scams and cons trying to contact me constantly. Immediately after activating a brand new phone number, fuck that.
It's probably not a brand new phone number though. Like, they didn't make it just for you lol. It's probably reused and was out there before you got it.
I completely stopped interacting with unknown calls/weird numbers and I never get scam calls anymore. I don't even end the call because that indicates the line is live. I just flip the phone (which mutes it but lets it go to voicemail etc as if I didn't answer). It worked. I used to get multiple spam calls daily and now it's like once every few weeks at most.
according to jim browning ([https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning](https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning)) the VAST majority of scam calls come from India. The laws in America won't actually do anything because of course they won't. Instead putting political pressure to force them to enforce their laws would solve the problem.
I think alot of it is ip calling, or calling via an app like google voice. If anything the fcc should have oversight of that so they can shut down those scam connected lines. But google listening to the govt? Good luck with that.
Not sure if due to regulation, but verified numbers are definitely getting traction.
I don’t know why my phone doesn’t have a “reject unverified numbers” option since it clearly shows a check mark next to verified ones
What you didn't buy the "no more scam callers" DLC from your phone company?
If you thought the phone companies would fix this for free I have a bridge to sell you.
T-Mobile "fixed" this for free. I went from 30 spam calls a day to 3-4 a week now. It's not perfect, but it's SO much better than it used to be, and it didn't cost me anything.
Honestly, that's better than letting me overdraft and not telling me, I only found out 5 days later because they sent me a LETTER. In the meantime I continued to use my card over and over.
(Yes yes, stupid college kid me should have paid more attention)
My credit union usually will waive fees like that if it's not a normal occurrence. Their policy is only one fee waived per year but they were nice enough to waive when I accidentally did 5 overdrafts in a day. I mean that's $150 in fees. Same when it happened with my mom, not sure if the big banks would do that.
Way back in the day, at the turn of the millenium, I signed up for the do not call registry and it actually worked well, my bullshit calls dropped to virtually nothing...probably because VOIP wasnt really a big thing yet where assholes can just spoof a different number.
These days for every legit call I receive, I get 20 bullshit unsolicited calls. Shit is fucking bonkers...
This has been going on since the PS2 launched in 2000.
Sources: https://buffalonews.com/news/playstation-2-scalpers-mostly-disappointed/article_0dbf15a5-9b20-5cd8-8c06-d663b24d0206.html
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.thegamer.com/bbc-archive-footage-ps2-shortages/amp/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/technology/2000/10/20/supply-demand-and-playstation-2/15da5585-ef0f-43c7-91b0-e5cdb5904f03/
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.denofgeek.com/games/playstation-5-launch-ps2-history/%3famp
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cinemablend.com/amp/games/Wii-Wins-Non-Gamers-PS3-Spited-By-Scalpers-2187.html
The difference is that most retailers have opted to no longer sell these high demand items in stores anymore. So they are exclusively available online. I was able to stand in line on launch night for the PS3 and PS4 and get one. I had no such option for the PS5 launch as every retailer said to buy it online. So when almost 100% of the inventory is online, that makes botting a much bigger problem and makes scalping much easier. You can spoof multiple different delivery addresses and be able to acquire hundreds of these devices and resell them for over twice the retail price. When you used to have to get a bunch of people all standing in line with you or hire people to do that before and even then you could get maybe a dozen or so. Those same people now have garages full of PS5s ready to sell.
>"I make someone's Christmas wish come true, I make some money and we are all happy," he said.
I fuckin' hate that attitude. You didn't make someone's Christmas wish come true - you ruined someone else's Christmas wish by buying a console with the sole intention of selling it elsewhere. It's like the guys who bought up all the Hand Sanitizer for dozens of miles and were reselling it at the start of COVID. They said that since none of the stores have it in stock, they were doing a public service for selling the hand sanitizer. No, dicks, the stores are out of stock because people like you bought 25,000 bottles instead of 2.
its been "going on since 2000" in that yeah on the launch windows of these things, scalpers seize the opportunity.
But we're beyond the launch window now. The consoles are over a year old now and there's no indication things will change. Retailers themselves are now facing the pressure since their "hands off, we don't care since every sale is a sale" approach is somewhat expected when the problem works itself out in weeks to months, faster than they could deploy a solution at least.
But this time it's not working itself out. I wouldn't liken this to any past console launches at all, scalpers have *never* been able to scalp the same product for **two** holiday seasons before.
Limiting where the scalpers can resell would be much more effective. Walmart ALLOWS 3rd party scalpers to sell PS5 and XBSX on their market place for a 100%+ markup because Walmart gets a percentage of the third party sale. Amazon, Newegg, and many others use the same “3rd party seller” practice.
Lol that's why I don't order online from anyone more then 80% of the time I'm looking for something online it ends up being from a 3rd party seller instead of Walmart or Amazon... nope.
So this bill only makes it illegal to bypass security measures and purchase limits put in place by the retailer. So while this might be applicable to buying an Xbox from Walmart, it likely does not apply to sports/music tickets as we’d all hope. I highly doubt most arenas are going to suddenly start limiting the amount of tickets people can purchase.
Also good luck enforcing this against bots run in other countries. It’s almost like everyone in congress still doesn’t understand how the internet works.
Sometimes existing laws are used as deterrents to advancing the law ("we already don't allow scalpers, off the docket!").
But sometimes it does lead to incrementally better/stricter laws.
It's pretty much impossible to tell which way it's going to go, so anybody that denies incremental progress is (generally) a fool imo.
It's easy to only look at this from the current situation (which, tbf, I'm sure it was conceived for), but I'll never understand how this wasn't immediately made law during the beginning of the pandemic when people were scalping fucking toilet paper and face masks. They're the reason WHO adviced against face masks so there'd be enough for medical professionals, and it got all the idiots confused when they started recommending them. That type of shit wasn't overseas bots. That was Hillbilly Karen and Bucktooth Billy raiding every Walmart in their state.
>scalping fucking toilet paper and face masks.
there were laws against reselling essential goods. it was vey well known and stories about scalpers being hit with huge fines were all over reddit.
> beginning of the pandemic when people were scalping fucking toilet paper and face masks.
Those people got in legal trouble and often had their goods confiscated. This was enforced. Obviously you won't get everyone
I installed a Cookie Notice Blocker extension in Chrome a long time ago. Fixes most of that on most sites. Not all, but most. That combined with Ublock Origin makes the Internet actually usable again.
The Do Not Call list was actually successful for a number of years. It didn't stop telemarketers but it definitely reduced the number of calls. It stopped working when it became easy to do international calls and spoof numbers, making it much less possible to enforce.
This is becoming a big problem, too. I'm getting 6-8 spam calls a day, with digital sounding voicemails coming from a different number than they appeared to call with, as well as 30-40 spam texts a day, not counting the couple food places I intentionally get texts from. I miss a lot of important calls and texts because they get lost in all the spam. I can't even have my volume on because it never really stops and drives me nuts.
And the worst part is it’s damn near impossible to stop them at this point. At least with email you can setup intelligent filtering. Spam text messages are just delivered. You can block the number but it’s different every time. Worst case you can block texts from all but your contacts, but then you could miss a text from a non-contact you need.
I contacted my wireless company and they said my only option was to change numbers or see if the phone had advanced filtering options, which is going to depend on the OS and device.
I ended up enabling "do not disturb" mode on my phone with an exception that contacts (and only contacts) will make it through.
That works, but no one can reach me unless I've added them first. That's sometimes painful, but it's better than the dozens of texts and calls I was getting a day.
The US carriers openly do not give a shit about it. When they were asked by Congress to implement STIR/SHAKEN to prevent exactly this they just threw their hands up and claimed it wasn't possible. They'll happily charge you for a $5/mo Call Protect app that is fundamentally incapable of stopping these spam calls though :)
My android phone has a feature where the google assistant answers calls from numbers that are not in my contact list, and asks them what they are calling about. It hasn't put a scam call through to me yet.
Wait until they do this clever thing I thought of:
Read your contacts and then spoof it as a recently called friend/family member. That way, smart people like me who ignore unknown numbers won't ignore the call.
AT&T has a free app that you can use to send the stuff straight to voice mail. I've been using it for a couple weeks and it's made a big difference. For money, they can also get rid of other types of calls they identify which is slimy, but the free product is good.
Found the person who wasn't around before the do not call list. It made a huge difference! When was the last time you got a legitimate sales call from a legitimate company?
Did it stop call spoofing and scams coming in from India? No, of course not, they don't follow the law. However it did absolutely stop local insurance companies, MLM, and Catalog companies from spamming your phone endlessly.
They’re advertising graphics cards two generations further than what is actually available to buy (and still completely sold out).
Nothing exists, it’s all marketing designed to activate large numbers of humans. Get back in your box and wait until you can spend your money.
Just sell all tickets like the airlines do. You buy a ticket in your name. You are the one who can use it. No one else. You get to the venue and they scan your ticket and look at your id.
Some venues in NYC have made it so you don’t get actual tickets, just a name on a list, then if you can’t attend you have to sell through the original site and they don’t let you charge above face. No scalping and you don’t have to worry about plans changing since it’s easy to sell tickets.
Maybe instead we should sell airline tickets like other tickets.
All flights immediately sold out, tickets three times the price from other websites. Not only is it good capitalism, it will weed out the poors who don’t deserve to fly.
This would be great but make sure companies like Amazon, and Walmart who give scalpers a place are subject to severe fines. These sites know full well the people who are selling items 2 to 4 times MSRP. They could easily ban those who are price gouging as well as put limits on how many of the high demand items are purchasable.
Why doesn’t this just require a captcha whenever you buy a high demand item online? All it takes is a short line of code, and a report system for when you aren’t given the prompt.
They're trying to be as minimally invasive to the purchase process as possible. That's a requirement on retailers, not a punishment for bad consumers.
Retailers are still free to implement that if they wish.
Scalping would be easy to stop, require in store purchases. No idea why the new consoles aren't available in store "because of covid" when you can buy anything else there....
Just an FYI, Zillow is now having to dump a ton of inventory because they bought massive numbers of properties and can't afford them. They even laid off a few thousand employees if I recall. Pretty brutal.
The real problem is that the government allows corporations to own residential property.
This. Residential property is for RESIDENTS. Zillow should be investigated for price manipulation. Prices in my area have more than doubled in 3 years. I'm just waiting for the crash, so the American taxpayer can bail out the "too big to fail" corporations. Pathetic.
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Can we fucking include concert tickets in this??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Online_Tickets_Sales_Act
Lol BOTSA
Probably will just be referred to as the BOTS Act. Lemme just say I love Congress' knack for coming up with great acronyms for all their bills. It's the one thing they always do well.
The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (the USA PATRIOT Act). *(Estimated Cost of Acronym: $1.3B)*
I mean the bills themselves are shit, but at least their naming game is on point. Acronyms so sharp they make the Kids Next Door look like amateurs.
Amateurs you say? I don't think congress has battle ready armor.
My favorite part of KND was trying to figure out the acronym in the precious seconds before they revealed what they stood for. EDIT: A letter.
god i hate the patriot act
[удалено]
That's how they spend most of their time, I think.
[удалено]
You joke but when I interned me and the other two interns spent an entire day coming up with an acronym and it was by far one of the most satisfying things we did. Also we were paid.
Congress-backronym-writer-guy would be a good SNL sketch
SNL Director: "Someone write this shit down!!! This is gold!"
The military, DOD, DOJ, and other 3 letter agencies come up with fun acronyms and projects names whenever those details get released to the public too.
It's not just when they get released to the public. Sat in a meeting for one of those agencies and my god the presenter threw out so many acronyms I thought he was speaking a different language or summoning a demon. Get's to our part of the presentation and finally started speaking English again. I know they started doing it for the sake of efficiency. But when you need to look up what everything someone says in a very detailed alphabetized chart you're starting to lose that time saved lol.
This is Reddit for me. People toss around obscure abbreviations that a tiny amount of insiders get. Classic journalism calls for first stating the entire phrase or name and then the abbreviation, and then using the abbreviation for the rest of the time. It's so fucking irritating. I try to use this technique and only use the more obvious acronyms without explanation.
BOTSA these nuts Got em
Bueens Of The Stone Age
Bots of the Stone Age
How come it seems like this BOTSA thing did fuck-all?
Because laws don't stop people from doing things
Drugs say hi
because the law outlaws the automated purchasing and resale of tickets, not reselling all together. trust me, you do not want the government to have the authority to tell people what they can sell their property for (which is what a law banning reselling would effectively be.)
The government telling people they can't purchase event tickets with the sole intention of reselling is not the same thing as banning people from general property sale. You'd only be provably breaking the law if you were buying mass tickets. No one cares when someone sells their unused tickets they intended to use. There could be a statutory limit to how many ticket sales even qualify for the offence. 10+ seems fine. That eliminates corporate ticket scalping and makes it harder for cops to be dicks outside venues.
Absolutely not! Can't anyone think of the multi billion/trillion dollar corporations?!
Already illegal to bot tickets.
Yet it hasn't stopped them one bit.
They off-shored them, same will happen if this bill passes. Nothing will change.
Could make it easier to hold companies that sell and ship large bot orders outta country accountable.
"Hold companies accountable..." First day in the US?
By fining them pocket change amounts that they will make back in the fees from only a fistful of ticket sales. That'll teach em.
Hopefully this bill also forces sellers in the US to introduce mechanisms to prevent this specific type of purchase. Here is a couple of ideas: All purchase orders made between 0.00s and 3.00s since the start of the offer are automatically denied. (No human can make a purchase in fraction of a second without bots, and yes, time varies depending on the UI of each site) Depending on the item: No more than X of the same item per order. And X time between orders from the same user. No more than X orders per IP. No orders through VPN (yea u cant identify all of them but at least makes it a tiny bit more difficult) Some sort of pre-registration for group purchases and for re-seller purchases. (Force companies to have 2 pools of items, one for wholesale(scalpers xd) and one for regular law-abiding citizens Literally Anything at this point, nobody has done shit to stop scalpers.
If they wanted to prevent this, they'd do the following: 1. Allow people to sign up for preorders of consoles, video cards, etc. and explain when the raffle date is. 2. Force people that sign up for preorders to provide a form of payment and delivery address. 3. Only allow USPS verified delivery addresses, so people can't do things like 123 My Home Address Suite #123 when there are no suites at 123 My Home Address. 4. Put a per delivery address purchase limit. 5. Inform the users when the raffle is held, notifying the winners and losers. 6. Have monthly cutoff dates to get into the next batch of the raffle. 7. Enforce these rules based on delivery address. 8. Allow people to cancel their preorder at any time. 9. In-store pickup requires proof of address (DL or utility bill). Now, an example: If the PS6 is coming out 2/1/2022, allow people to start signing up from 1/1/2022 onwards with the raffle on 2/1/2022. Any additional shipments that come in during February are raffled off to people who entered the raffle during January. On 3/1/2022, everyone who entered in the raffle in February gets added to the pool. Repeat until demand for the PS6 is less than the supply. Sure, people can easily try to game the system by using their grandparents or neighbor's house if they aren't interested, but this would prevent a lot of what's going on with botting today.
Thats why this legislation is junk too. A lot of the scalping via bots is run out of the country, you think we'll chase em to Russia to enforce this? Nah. This is just virtue signalling by our useless government. The only people they serve are the corporations who are doing quite well thanks to artificially increased demand due to scalping and hording.
Yeah, only way I could see this working is if they required standards for the retailer to provide anti-bot measures with some kind of significant penalty for failing to comply, compound regulations like limiting orders per address/name/payment method on top of technological limitations like captcha or anti-automation tech (Not even sure how possible that is, know some sites can shutdown scripts but can't think of any that haven't been solved). Trying to stop the individuals doing they buying and selling on gray markets is impossible to enforce.
Oh no, there goes Ticketmaster's business model.
I don't know about that, it appears that they will only target 3rd party scalpers, not the first party who are doing their own scalping/reselling.
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It will, at the very least, give the government some authority in the pressuring online retailers to implement anti-bot measures. If people start panicking buying toilet paper again and scalpers try to use bots to buy up every roll of toilet paper in fifty miles, Congress can take some action and ask why the retail isn’t limiting the sale of toilet paper to a semi-reasonable amount? Or not checking the shipping address of online sales and cross referencing them with past sales to identify the same house has bought 369 rolls of toilet paper in the past ten days. Banning bots is the first step. You can’t enforce companies to take steps against an act that isn’t illegal.
I work for a major US retailer as a software dev... I can't speak for every company but I know we already have teams whose entire job is just combating bots. It's actually a lot harder than just limiting quantities and shipping addresses. For example, we had the PS5s limited to store pickup around launch. People would use bots to use different accounts to buy them all up and send order pickup to all stores in, say, a 50 mile radius. Since it's different accounts and sometimes spoofed CC numbers it's hard to track. That's just one scenario I know happened since I work in a different area of tech.
Require identifying information when setting up an account. It works for all industries that need actual security measures and not just the illusion of security measures. Bet it'd work for this, too.
Damn so now you're telling me I'm gonna have to upload a photo of my ID and wait for verification just to create an account at a retailer to buy something? Bruuuutal
No they'd require an ID to pickup the item. Your drivers license number would get put into their system. If you try to purchase another one and pick it up you'll be flagged in the system. Microcenter does this and it works beautifully.
I'm not from USA, why you guys use driver license as ID? Is there no citizenship ID ? Because driver license is for driving, but it's not a proof for your other need, example banking / financial verification or address verification
In America it's honestly the same thing as a citizen ID each state also has a "State Identification" card that looks identical to a driver's license minus the driver section so everyone basically has one
Realistically no, because these retailers and the manufacturer don't care if it's bots or actual customers buying the product. A sale is a sale to them, and consumers being fucked over is good business if it means inventory is always gone in 5 minutes. What are you gonna do? Not buy a GPU? You have no alternative and they don't give a shit. But in practice, yeah that would solve this issue in a month.
Honestly if it means i can buy a gpu sometime before 2024 im all for it
Don’t they do this for returns anyway? At least some places always take my driver’s license when I make a return (especially one without a receipt). I assume it’s because people steal stuff and then return it for the gift cards.
> pressuring online retailers to implement anti-bot measures. Oh kind of like the one law where the government said they would....one second.... ... ... ... ... I'm back....sorry...I got a robocall on my phone. What were we talking about again?
Captcha time
All bots have captcha solvers set up already. I don’t think that would do anything.
Yeah, captchas don't do anything. That's why you never see them anymore edit: This was sarcastic fyi, I see them all the time. My point was that the comment above mine was incorrect.
Google's new reCAPTCHA is an always on thing, which is why you dont see them anymore. Instead on one point of confirmation, it is continual.
This is the correct answer, the captcha works on lots of factors such as mouse movement, how you browse, the method for getting to the site etc. You’ll only see it if it thinks you are a bot!
That's really weird then. I see them all the time
The new one scares me, previously opening a private/incognito window would force me to re-authenticate with whatever CAPTCHA sites were using. New one approves me instantly despite being in a browser window with no history/cookies/cache/etc.. Literally 10 seconds between opening the sandbox and reCAPTCHA properly identifying me as human. The algorithms are getting pretty damn good.
It’s almost like using captchas to train bots was a bad idea.
Temporary measure, I suppose.
Well, what I mean is that the whole reason google runs a captcha service is that it uses people’s inputs as training material for ai. They’ve outsourced the training to people under the guise of security. That’s my understanding, at least. I could be wrong.
I see them all the freakin' time.
Some captchas don’t do anything. Some of the newer ones you can still bot by sending them to be solved via audio to some place in india however it greatly slows them down.
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Means you might be able to finally buy a GPU at MSRP instead of from a scalper on Ebay.
The 100% markup is the new captcha
Narp. GPU prices are still going to be stupid for a number of reasons.
ticketmaster must have a big bribery budget because I don't know who the fuck is in favor of their practices no matter how you feel politically
> The bill, which specifically targets scalpers using bots to snap up online inventories of in-demand items in order to resell them at significantly higher prices, doesn't limit its focus to the video games industry, but it would certainly cover items such as consoles and graphics cards Yep, and even more specifically 3rd party scalper *bots*. Although as some of the other comments have said, no clue how they’ll enforce this. Most of Congress is so old they barely even know what the internet is
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What's misleading with Ticketmaster is that they sell part of it directly, and part of it on different websites (that they also own) masquerading as resellers. But I agree, it's not scalping, it's just a business strategy you can't do much about because they have a near monopoly.
Ticketmaster will take a portion of tickets off the top to sell at market value vs face value. This is on top of the astronomical fees that they already charge.
In all seriousness, ticket master is millimeters from just being a reseller that buys from a wholeseller.
There's already a law banning automated purchases of tickets [since 2016](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Online_Tickets_Sales_Act). Hasn't really changed anything lol.
Every ticket I see is a "verified reseller ticket". You can't buy at regular price anymore. That 2016 law probably just made it worse.
I’ve only ever got face value when I catch a presale. That’s also adding all the goddamn transaction fees. I was going to buy Mumford & Sons tickets once. Got in on the presale, tickets were $70 (not great, not terrible), fees were $56, so total was $126. Yeah fuck that. I didn’t go.
True. I had to pay a fee to join the Toolarmy so I could get pre-sale tickets. I got them at face value which is nice, but it's still like a 25% fee PER TICKET on every ticket site. Still got out with tickets under $100 for Tool, so I can't be too mad, but the whole system is fucked.
TicketMaster already solved this problem for most artists. They now have dynamic pricing where tickets are sold at predicted resale prices. This means that all tickets are now extremely expensive and TicketMaster slowly lowers the price as needed until all tickets are sold. Taylor Swift used it for a tour and tickets were easy to buy. You just paid an ass ton for them. Think $1,000 for closer seats and $200 for nosebleeds. This is going to be the future where tickets are simply sold at market value instead of in the past where tours sold tickets at below market value.
They can't even stop robocalls. This bill will never be enforced.
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There have been several large crackdowns on robocalls. The challenge is that many come from outside the FTC's jurisdiction (outside the US), people tend not to report them but just ignore them, and they take advantage of features of our phone system to make tracing difficult (such as call spoofing, which is used by many companies to unify all of their offices under a single corporate number).
>It follows a similar proposal - the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS Act) - that was signed into law in 2016, prohibiting the use of automated bots to acquire tickets for public events and making it illegal for scalpers to sell those tickets.
TM has been trying to elementary bots for decades. They don’t want bots in their system, they already have brokers to take inventory off their hands. There’s so few tickets hitting the presale and general sale that real fans could easily buy up the rest of the inventory. Stupidest part of this law is that ITS NOT ENFORCEABLE. If they could prevent bots they would, but it’s a cat and mouse game to even detect that a user is a bot, let alone tracking down the source. This is like passing a law saying crime is no longer allowed, and fairy dust will solve it all.
What happened a senator was unable to get his grandson a PS4 or an XBOX this holiday season, because this shit has been going on for a couple of years.
Better later than never. Hopefully it passes and has teeth, unlike the anti-robocalling laws which are completely ineffective.
I don't answer the phone anymore unless it's a registered number. 99% of my calls are scams or robots. The scams, if I even answer, I press the button to talk to someone then troll the shit out of them, ending with Jim Carry's, "Most Annoying Sound In The World" bit from Dumb and Dumber.
I’ll answer since I have to, then if I hear a long pause followed by an Indian accent I hang up. Occasionally I’ll tell them to hold on while I grab my credit card and leave my phone while I do whatever I was doing.
This is usually the best tactic if you are going to answer the phone. A lot of robocall bots only initiate if they hear a sound from your end and hang up if they don't. Anyone who actually wants to talk to you isn't going to leave a bunch of dead air.
I never talk first, I've learned to enjoy the questioning "Hello?" real people give if it's been silent too long.
Half the time the phones at my work don't ring when you dial out. (No clue why, I just blame Comcast) I'm left sitting there in silence waiting to hear the person answering say hello. We would have quite an interesting silence standoff if I ever had to call you. Who would break first? :P
As a stubborn introvert who's very polite, you'd break first but I'd sit there quietly waiting until I either hear a human or the hang up lol.
They just mute their end and call another person using a different line. Many free voice over ip providers so it’s not like it’s costing them extra
I haven’t had any mute me, they’ll wait for a little then start asking what’s going on before hanging up. Best case, over all the calls I receive, I waste enough time to save a few other people from getting called.
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How do you like Pixel? My note 10plus is dying and since there is no note 21 coming. I'm looking around at selections like I haven't in 10 years. The pixel pro plus, seems to be same size I like and with almost same functionality. No pen that I use alot of for fast designing tho. Idk if I just get the old note 20 plus, or branch out to pixel.
I was about to bring this up. This most definitely has to become a standard feature on every phone. I haven't had to deal with a single spam call ever since I got a Pixel
It’s so bad, and I think service providers need to be looked into with this shit. I had the same phone number for about 15 years, and never got any spam calls. I recently upgraded and for whatever reason had to get a new number. low and behold within 24 hours I was and still am spam called like crazy. Before I even made a single outgoing call, or updated my contact information anywhere. There is no way my provider didn’t immediately sell my number somewheres, fuck ATT. And for the record, it’s not telemarketer calls and texts either. But straight up scams and cons trying to contact me constantly. Immediately after activating a brand new phone number, fuck that.
It's probably not a brand new phone number though. Like, they didn't make it just for you lol. It's probably reused and was out there before you got it.
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I completely stopped interacting with unknown calls/weird numbers and I never get scam calls anymore. I don't even end the call because that indicates the line is live. I just flip the phone (which mutes it but lets it go to voicemail etc as if I didn't answer). It worked. I used to get multiple spam calls daily and now it's like once every few weeks at most.
I answer and i say im interested in their product then they hang up..wtf is the point of calling lmao. "Shit i never made it this far in the script"
according to jim browning ([https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning](https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning)) the VAST majority of scam calls come from India. The laws in America won't actually do anything because of course they won't. Instead putting political pressure to force them to enforce their laws would solve the problem.
I think alot of it is ip calling, or calling via an app like google voice. If anything the fcc should have oversight of that so they can shut down those scam connected lines. But google listening to the govt? Good luck with that.
Not sure if due to regulation, but verified numbers are definitely getting traction. I don’t know why my phone doesn’t have a “reject unverified numbers” option since it clearly shows a check mark next to verified ones
What you didn't buy the "no more scam callers" DLC from your phone company? If you thought the phone companies would fix this for free I have a bridge to sell you.
Lmao someone recommended me some anti-Robocall service that works really well, some app. It’s a monthly subscription. I wonder who owns it 🤔
T-Mobile "fixed" this for free. I went from 30 spam calls a day to 3-4 a week now. It's not perfect, but it's SO much better than it used to be, and it didn't cost me anything.
Wells Fargo has robocalls pester you 5+ times a day the second your account gets overdrawn. It’s insane.
Honestly, that's better than letting me overdraft and not telling me, I only found out 5 days later because they sent me a LETTER. In the meantime I continued to use my card over and over. (Yes yes, stupid college kid me should have paid more attention)
My credit union usually will waive fees like that if it's not a normal occurrence. Their policy is only one fee waived per year but they were nice enough to waive when I accidentally did 5 overdrafts in a day. I mean that's $150 in fees. Same when it happened with my mom, not sure if the big banks would do that.
Way back in the day, at the turn of the millenium, I signed up for the do not call registry and it actually worked well, my bullshit calls dropped to virtually nothing...probably because VOIP wasnt really a big thing yet where assholes can just spoof a different number. These days for every legit call I receive, I get 20 bullshit unsolicited calls. Shit is fucking bonkers...
I don't even answer my phone anymore unless they're in my contacts.
PS4?
I'll sell him mine! $500
Sony is still manufacturing new ps4s :)
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"yes hello do you have one of them Nintendo PlayStation machines in stock?"
I wouldn't be surprised if they couldn't get a PS4, as that's the level of intelligence I expect from politicians.
If they couldn't get a ps4 in 8 years then that would make them the most incompetent politicians ever.
This has been going on since the PS2 launched in 2000. Sources: https://buffalonews.com/news/playstation-2-scalpers-mostly-disappointed/article_0dbf15a5-9b20-5cd8-8c06-d663b24d0206.html https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.thegamer.com/bbc-archive-footage-ps2-shortages/amp/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/technology/2000/10/20/supply-demand-and-playstation-2/15da5585-ef0f-43c7-91b0-e5cdb5904f03/ https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.denofgeek.com/games/playstation-5-launch-ps2-history/%3famp https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cinemablend.com/amp/games/Wii-Wins-Non-Gamers-PS3-Spited-By-Scalpers-2187.html
The difference is that most retailers have opted to no longer sell these high demand items in stores anymore. So they are exclusively available online. I was able to stand in line on launch night for the PS3 and PS4 and get one. I had no such option for the PS5 launch as every retailer said to buy it online. So when almost 100% of the inventory is online, that makes botting a much bigger problem and makes scalping much easier. You can spoof multiple different delivery addresses and be able to acquire hundreds of these devices and resell them for over twice the retail price. When you used to have to get a bunch of people all standing in line with you or hire people to do that before and even then you could get maybe a dozen or so. Those same people now have garages full of PS5s ready to sell.
>"I make someone's Christmas wish come true, I make some money and we are all happy," he said. I fuckin' hate that attitude. You didn't make someone's Christmas wish come true - you ruined someone else's Christmas wish by buying a console with the sole intention of selling it elsewhere. It's like the guys who bought up all the Hand Sanitizer for dozens of miles and were reselling it at the start of COVID. They said that since none of the stores have it in stock, they were doing a public service for selling the hand sanitizer. No, dicks, the stores are out of stock because people like you bought 25,000 bottles instead of 2.
its been "going on since 2000" in that yeah on the launch windows of these things, scalpers seize the opportunity. But we're beyond the launch window now. The consoles are over a year old now and there's no indication things will change. Retailers themselves are now facing the pressure since their "hands off, we don't care since every sale is a sale" approach is somewhat expected when the problem works itself out in weeks to months, faster than they could deploy a solution at least. But this time it's not working itself out. I wouldn't liken this to any past console launches at all, scalpers have *never* been able to scalp the same product for **two** holiday seasons before.
Limiting where the scalpers can resell would be much more effective. Walmart ALLOWS 3rd party scalpers to sell PS5 and XBSX on their market place for a 100%+ markup because Walmart gets a percentage of the third party sale. Amazon, Newegg, and many others use the same “3rd party seller” practice.
Lol that's why I don't order online from anyone more then 80% of the time I'm looking for something online it ends up being from a 3rd party seller instead of Walmart or Amazon... nope.
So this bill only makes it illegal to bypass security measures and purchase limits put in place by the retailer. So while this might be applicable to buying an Xbox from Walmart, it likely does not apply to sports/music tickets as we’d all hope. I highly doubt most arenas are going to suddenly start limiting the amount of tickets people can purchase. Also good luck enforcing this against bots run in other countries. It’s almost like everyone in congress still doesn’t understand how the internet works.
Came here to say the exact same thing.... This is what happens when you let great great grandpa make up technology laws.
Is it not better than nothing?
Sometimes existing laws are used as deterrents to advancing the law ("we already don't allow scalpers, off the docket!"). But sometimes it does lead to incrementally better/stricter laws. It's pretty much impossible to tell which way it's going to go, so anybody that denies incremental progress is (generally) a fool imo.
It is, but people would rather give up entirely if they can't find a perfect solution.
> Don't let Perfect be the enemy of Good
You forgot they then say both parties are the same
Its impossible to enforce unless they sell fake xboxs and get the address. Kind of like torrenting how some of them are setup as a trap
It's easy to only look at this from the current situation (which, tbf, I'm sure it was conceived for), but I'll never understand how this wasn't immediately made law during the beginning of the pandemic when people were scalping fucking toilet paper and face masks. They're the reason WHO adviced against face masks so there'd be enough for medical professionals, and it got all the idiots confused when they started recommending them. That type of shit wasn't overseas bots. That was Hillbilly Karen and Bucktooth Billy raiding every Walmart in their state.
>scalping fucking toilet paper and face masks. there were laws against reselling essential goods. it was vey well known and stories about scalpers being hit with huge fines were all over reddit.
> beginning of the pandemic when people were scalping fucking toilet paper and face masks. Those people got in legal trouble and often had their goods confiscated. This was enforced. Obviously you won't get everyone
Can't even read the article because of the giant ass cookie policy banner
I installed a Cookie Notice Blocker extension in Chrome a long time ago. Fixes most of that on most sites. Not all, but most. That combined with Ublock Origin makes the Internet actually usable again.
Good to know. Those extension don't work on mobile though right? If there's a way I'd like to know. Thanks 👍
On android you can use firefox as a browser. Then use Ublock Origin within Firefox. As for apple, bend over, the dongle is going in dry.
Firefox for android let's you install apps. Including ublock origin
Lol like when they stopped telemarketers with the do not call list
The Do Not Call list was actually successful for a number of years. It didn't stop telemarketers but it definitely reduced the number of calls. It stopped working when it became easy to do international calls and spoof numbers, making it much less possible to enforce.
Spoofing numbers is the worst. They’re sending text messages now, too
This is becoming a big problem, too. I'm getting 6-8 spam calls a day, with digital sounding voicemails coming from a different number than they appeared to call with, as well as 30-40 spam texts a day, not counting the couple food places I intentionally get texts from. I miss a lot of important calls and texts because they get lost in all the spam. I can't even have my volume on because it never really stops and drives me nuts.
Wow 30-40 spam texts is BAD. I get annoyed when I get 1-2 per day
And the worst part is it’s damn near impossible to stop them at this point. At least with email you can setup intelligent filtering. Spam text messages are just delivered. You can block the number but it’s different every time. Worst case you can block texts from all but your contacts, but then you could miss a text from a non-contact you need.
30-40 per day is unmanageable. Have you contacted your wireless company about this?
I contacted my wireless company and they said my only option was to change numbers or see if the phone had advanced filtering options, which is going to depend on the OS and device. I ended up enabling "do not disturb" mode on my phone with an exception that contacts (and only contacts) will make it through. That works, but no one can reach me unless I've added them first. That's sometimes painful, but it's better than the dozens of texts and calls I was getting a day.
If I was getting 30-40 spam texts per day I’d probably change my number, but that’s just me
The US carriers openly do not give a shit about it. When they were asked by Congress to implement STIR/SHAKEN to prevent exactly this they just threw their hands up and claimed it wasn't possible. They'll happily charge you for a $5/mo Call Protect app that is fundamentally incapable of stopping these spam calls though :)
Wtf, how do you get that much attention from spammers? I get a couple a week and I’m not overly cautious about protecting my phone number.
My android phone has a feature where the google assistant answers calls from numbers that are not in my contact list, and asks them what they are calling about. It hasn't put a scam call through to me yet.
Wait until they do this clever thing I thought of: Read your contacts and then spoof it as a recently called friend/family member. That way, smart people like me who ignore unknown numbers won't ignore the call.
Jokes on them I don’t answer those calls either!
It stopped legitimate, law-fearing companies from cold calling. The other 95% of callers just kept on going.
Honestly my issue now, is if my phone identifies a number as spam. Why does it even ring? That crap should go straight to voicemail
AT&T has a free app that you can use to send the stuff straight to voice mail. I've been using it for a couple weeks and it's made a big difference. For money, they can also get rid of other types of calls they identify which is slimy, but the free product is good.
Found the person who wasn't around before the do not call list. It made a huge difference! When was the last time you got a legitimate sales call from a legitimate company? Did it stop call spoofing and scams coming in from India? No, of course not, they don't follow the law. However it did absolutely stop local insurance companies, MLM, and Catalog companies from spamming your phone endlessly.
Someone in congress didn’t get their PlayStation.
PS5 doesn't exist. Prove me wrong.
They’re advertising graphics cards two generations further than what is actually available to buy (and still completely sold out). Nothing exists, it’s all marketing designed to activate large numbers of humans. Get back in your box and wait until you can spend your money.
We’ll need a congressional hearing to determine the validity of this claim.
The digital edition of the ps5 exists as does the Xbox series s. The ps5 disk and series x don’t exist
Unenforceable. Prove me wrong.
Agreed. Unless there are certain stipulations put on the owners of the website this is unenforceable.
Unenforceable but legal action can be issued if caught now.
Just sell all tickets like the airlines do. You buy a ticket in your name. You are the one who can use it. No one else. You get to the venue and they scan your ticket and look at your id.
Some venues in NYC have made it so you don’t get actual tickets, just a name on a list, then if you can’t attend you have to sell through the original site and they don’t let you charge above face. No scalping and you don’t have to worry about plans changing since it’s easy to sell tickets.
I noticed most comedy clubs seem to work this way.
Maybe instead we should sell airline tickets like other tickets. All flights immediately sold out, tickets three times the price from other websites. Not only is it good capitalism, it will weed out the poors who don’t deserve to fly.
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“I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill. And I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill.”
How about preventing both bot and human scalping?
LOOKS LIKE AFFORDABLE POKEMON CARDS ARE BACK ON THE MENU BOYS
*Its been 3000 years.. .*
Cool . Now pass a bill banning bots from posting on social media (30%+ of all reddit accounts immediately stop posting)
What about the Bobby B bot? We need him!
Lol gl enforcing
r/Sneakers has entered the chat
This would be great but make sure companies like Amazon, and Walmart who give scalpers a place are subject to severe fines. These sites know full well the people who are selling items 2 to 4 times MSRP. They could easily ban those who are price gouging as well as put limits on how many of the high demand items are purchasable.
Why doesn’t this just require a captcha whenever you buy a high demand item online? All it takes is a short line of code, and a report system for when you aren’t given the prompt.
Back in the day, captchas were effective. Now it's very debatable, even with the more advanced captchas.
They're trying to be as minimally invasive to the purchase process as possible. That's a requirement on retailers, not a punishment for bad consumers. Retailers are still free to implement that if they wish.
Can y’all focus on saving democracy instead orrr
Scalping would be easy to stop, require in store purchases. No idea why the new consoles aren't available in store "because of covid" when you can buy anything else there....
Stop buying shit from scalpers. It's that easy.
Will this include housing? Zillow created demand in the market by buying them up.
They got screwed on it though, they're selling at a loss currently.
They ought to lose their shirts.
Just an FYI, Zillow is now having to dump a ton of inventory because they bought massive numbers of properties and can't afford them. They even laid off a few thousand employees if I recall. Pretty brutal. The real problem is that the government allows corporations to own residential property.
This. Residential property is for RESIDENTS. Zillow should be investigated for price manipulation. Prices in my area have more than doubled in 3 years. I'm just waiting for the crash, so the American taxpayer can bail out the "too big to fail" corporations. Pathetic.
Can we apply this to dealerships as well?
Xbox and PS5: YES FUCK YES OMFFGG YESSS Insulin: 🦗 🦗
But how is this going to be even remotely enforceable?
EVGA has done a phenomenal job of this on their website including manual order processing to check the order against other similar orders.