A ring of ticket brokers has been indicted in connection to an elaborate hacking scheme that used bots and other fraudulent means to purchase more than 1 million tickets for concerts, sporting events and other events.

The defendants made more than $25 million in profits from the resale of the tickets between 2002 and 2009.

...

The perpetrators' bots monitored ticket websites and sprang into action the minute tickets went on sale, opening thousands of internet connections simultaneously, defeating [Ticketmasters] CAPTCHAs...

Ticketmaster used various means to try to thwart Wiseguy's operation, at one point switching to a service called reCAPTCHA, which is also used by Facebook.

But the perpetrators were able to thwart [reCaptcha] as well. ... They identified the file ID of each CAPTCHA challenge and created a database of CAPTCHA "answers" to correspond to each ID. The bot would then identify the file ID of a challenge at Ticketmaster and feed back the corresponding answer.

Read More:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/wiseguys-indicted/