For Mayhem or Madness
4
Play Ball!
I WAS SERIOUSLY giving that vacation to the Cayman Islands some consideration. In fact, anyplace where there was sunshine, white sand, and bikinis. I’d about reached the point where I’d give up the sunshine and white sand if there were still bikinis.
Well, sometimes dreaming things seems to preface them happening.
I’d done a minor job for the Mariners a year ago when someone hacked their ticket system just before the playoffs. I didn’t have any time to spare on the job. There was a significant threat of counterfeit tickets being sold that looked like they came straight from the team’s box office. There wasn’t time to mobilize the FBI. I found the hacker and totally destroyed his operation. Not only did I take down his website, I found all his original files, financial information, and bank accounts. I wiped it all.
The stupid punk actually tried to complain to the Mariners.
He came in. This time the Feds were waiting for him. He went to jail.
You can screw with the government, but don’t mess around with the American League.
It was the Twins that called this time. They had just completed major renovations to their facility in Fort Myers and wanted a full security review of the computer network. Spring training games would start in two weeks and players were onsite. It was a preseason test of their systems as well.
Florida in March. Baseball and bikinis. What could be better?
Ticket scalping is a huge business in Florida during March. The first thing I did when I got to my hotel was go online and get a ticket for that night’s game against the Orioles. There were only a dozen tickets left and I was glad to get one, even though it was $30 plus a $5 delivery fee. When I got to the stadium and paid my $10 to park in a field, I dialed the number I’d been given. The guy said to meet him on the main concourse where the flags were and with a description of me, he flagged me down immediately. He handed me my ticket and I went into the stadium, impressed that the box office delivered tickets out on the mall.
Of course, the stadium was only about two-thirds full.
I’d paid twice the box office price for the ticket I bought and a service charge to boot. But the website had looked official. I thought I was buying direct from the Twins. I’d used a VISA gift card to buy the ticket through a secure verified site that I recognized. But like thousands of other rubes rushing to Florida to get into a game, I’d just bought from a scalper.
Well, at least the Twins beat the Orioles.
I met Dave Henry, the director of corporate security, at the Twins office the next morning and got teased no end. He looked at my gray suit and tie and shook his head.
“Not in Florida, man. Are you sure we want you as our guru on this?” Dave asked. He was dressed in khaki shorts, a golf shirt, and sandals. “I left you a ticket at the box office. Instead, you go out and pay double to the people we’re worried about. And you show up in a suit and tie.”
“I just wanted to test the competition,” I said weakly. “Dave, that site made it look like I was buying directly from the Twins with a special concierge service. These guys must take a huge bite out of your business.”
“Well, no, they don’t. That’s not the problem. The tickets are all legit. They buy them, sometimes get a group rate for a block of seats, but still it’s a regular sale. Then they resell them. We made the same amount for that seat that we would have made if you bought the ticket at the box office. And the scalper makes just as much.”
“It doesn’t seem right to let the fans get ripped off like that, though,” I said.
“That’s where the problem is. Scalpers are responsible for anywhere from ten to twenty percent of our seat sales. That’s a sizable chunk of change, even in pre-season. These guys might get a small discount when they buy bulk. That’s business. The heavy hitters even buy up blocks of season tickets for the home stadium in Minneapolis. We think of them the same way we think of corporations and radio stations buying up blocks or season tickets and then giving them to employees or listeners. It’s a rare executive that actually attends all the ballgames they buy tickets for,” he said.
“You’ve got me there,” I said. “I can’t imagine shelling out that kind of money and not using the ticket.”
“Oh, they use them. They reward employees, have give-away contests, even auction them off for charity. Four tickets in the concierge section to a home game against the Yankees went for two grand at a charity auction last season. The corporate sponsor wrote the cost of the tickets off as a charitable contribution.”
“So, the corporation gets a write-off, the buyer gets a write-off for the same amount, and they get to go to the game, too? Doesn’t sound right.”
“Well, it’s not quite right. The corporate sponsor gets a write-off for the cost of the ticket. The buyer at the auction gets a donation receipt for the amount of purchase less the declared value of the tickets. So technically, they pay the cost for enjoying the game. Scalpers work the same way. As far as we can ascertain, they are a legal business and can buy and sell. That’s how scalpers end up with high price tickets for the playoffs and World Series. Season ticket holders have first rights to post-season tickets. It’s people believing they’re buying from us that creates the problem,” Dave said.
“Tell me what you want,” I said.
“Well, the commissioner is coming down on the individual franchises for ‘allowing’ the unauthorized use of Major League Baseball logos and images. We can be fined for it. Owners don’t like to be fined. Our lawyers have sent cease and desist letters to all the known sites. Most of them are ignored. Some get a response that says ‘sure,’ and then are ignored. In general, no change. We need to show the commissioners that we are acting in good faith to stop the unauthorized use of MLB and franchise look and feel.”
“Reminds me of the IOC trying to get Washington to change the name of its mountains because it was in violation of the Olympic trademark,” I mused. “Okay. I’ll need to do about a week of research and hacking before I advise you on an approach. Let’s say a week from today.”
“Your room is paid for and you have tickets for all the games in the owners’ suite here at the Hammond Stadium during March. Fort Myers Beach is twenty minutes away and this is Ivy League week. You should probably go down there to give your eyes a rest once in a while. I hear you work mostly at night.” I grinned at him. That was the bikini side of the equation.
I had an idea but it really was going to take some research to see if it would work. You can copy just about anything from the Internet, so getting images, logos, and even the color specifications from the team site or MLB was really no problem for the scalper sites. Of course, I could amp up the security for the Twins to prevent that, but that created problems for the webmaster and made legitimate use more complicated. I went to the afternoon game against Tampa, which the Twins lost handily, and then headed back to my hotel to start investigating. I hadn’t recognized a single name on the Twins’ roster, but that’s what spring training is for.
About four o’clock in the morning, I called it a night and crashed. At least the bed was as long as I was. If I wasn’t hosted by the Twins, I’d never have found a room in Florida in March. I’d heard some colleges were including a shared room near the beach during spring break as an option in their campus housing program. Everybody wants a cut of the action.
It was only one a.m. in Seattle, so I tossed and turned for nearly an hour before I finally dozed off. Funny, though, how I didn’t wake up until it was nine in Seattle.
Resting my eyes sounded like a good idea, so I grabbed a pair of swimming trunks, a Black Sabbath T-shirt, and my sunglasses—bought especially for this trip. I headed for the beach.
I was really too old for this. Andi would slap my hands if they touched someone under thirty. ‘Half your age plus seven,’ she’d remind me. Damn it, Andi. We could have been so happy. Five years wasn’t enough to recover and if a nineteen-year-old college coed decided I was okay for her, I’d be okay with that. What can I say? I’m a pig.
Being a blond Swede, I slathered enough sunblock on me to barbecue a pig. At least this brand worked into my skin and didn’t look like I had white shoe polish on my nose. The first thing I did was stop at Walmart. Somehow a black T-shirt just didn’t seem right for a white sand beach. I ran through their selection quickly and chose a bright green Hawaiian Aloha shirt for five bucks. With my red trunks, I felt like Christmas, but St. Patrick’s Day was coming up and I didn’t own anything else green.
I found a place to park for $10 for the rest of the day and squeezed my rental car between two pickup trucks with Pennsylvania license plates. I took off to see the lay of the land. I have to say that my heart got a workout as I walked along the beach.
Teenage girls are magnificent. First of all, it didn’t make a difference if they were overweight or scrawny as Mad Aunt Hattie’s old hen. When all they had was three strategically placed triangles of cloth between them and the world, they were beautiful. I don’t think I’d had an erection in five years that I hadn’t concentrated on getting. Here, where all I was wearing was my wild Hawaiian shirt and a pair of trunks, I was having no difficulty at all.
Those round bottoms were all I could see.
I finally grabbed a bite to eat and left the beach. The Twins were at Detroit tonight and tomorrow. It was time to get more work done.
The weekend in Florida in March is a miraculous thing.
In the baseball business, it was no different than any other day of the week. Either Saturday or Sunday, sometimes both, the team would have a double header. They were here to work and choose the team that would gain a world championship ring in the fall. It was all about playing the prospects and gradually narrowing them down to the team they would field for the season opener on April first. There were players who played exactly one spring training game before they were sent to the minors. Some only played an inning and were released. By the end of March, we’d start seeing the veterans and pros take the field.
The beach, on the other hand, went through a transformation. Time expired for one group of colleges on spring break and began for another. By Sunday, the bikinis were newer, the eyes were brighter. It all went downhill from there. Yes, there were guys on the beach, too, but who noticed?
I tore into the scalpers’ websites and saw a lot of the same stuff. I had no idea this was such an organized business. Any individual scalper might have four to a dozen tickets to sell. But that makes a couple hundred tickets when a dozen scalpers get together and use a single website to peddle their wares. With a website, they can use credit cards, though I knew from my observations at the ballpark that some of them had card readers on their cell phones so they could take a credit card for a ticket in the parking lot. Customer service.
I ignored most of the transaction details since the team wasn’t concerned about them actually selling tickets. The real problem was the graphics and site design. I could, of course, simply take the sites down and send them a message that they’d been warned. They’d already received and ignored the cease and desist order, though, and it really didn’t take that much to deploy a new website. I finally came up with a proposal after testing a couple things in places I didn’t figure anyone would notice.
“I never thought I’d see a Swede with a suntan,” Dave laughed. “The work has turned you red.”
“Can’t work in sunlight,” I said. “It reflects off the screen. So, I work all night in the dark and sleep in the sun.”
“I hope you’ve kept one eye open while you’re sleeping,” he said. “The scenery is too good to miss.”
“Indeed.”
“What do you have?”
“There are six sites that are doing the bulk of the business. I think three of them had the same designer. You can hardly tell the difference between the sites. The other three sites have fairly minor differences. But there is a significant difference between the two groups. The sites that all have the same design are downloading their graphics directly from your site.”
“What? You mean they’ve hacked our site?”
“Yes, but it’s a minor hack. They are using your stylesheet and your graphic files with direct links. Every time someone hits their site, your site is recording traffic. If someone checks a source file, they find reference to here. It’s pretty clever in that anytime you update graphics or styles, they get the changes automatically,” I said. “But it also means that we have control of what they see. We change anything and the changes are effected on their site.”
“But they go into effect on our site, too,” Dave challenged.
“I can hide the files you use and simply replace the ones they are linked to.”
“You need to talk to our webmaster.”
“Of course.”
“What about the other three sites?”
“Well, the reason they don’t have the same quality look is that they’ve actually grabbed the graphics and info off the Internet and built them into their own sites. It means, basically, that I’ll have to hack their sites and change the graphics and colors. On the other hand, the good news is that they don’t update their sites regularly. It looks like their webmaster pretty much just deals with the transaction software. The sites themselves haven’t been updated in a year or more. In one instance three years,” I said.
“So, what’s the recommendation?”
“I’d like to commission a new set of graphics and color scheme. You’ll actually continue to own artwork that’s used. But we’ll trade it out for what appears on their sites. It will be non-MLB intellectual property released under Creative Commons. It will change, but not destroy the scalper sites. They will still look clean and professional, but they won’t be quite as closely identified with the team or the league.” He mulled over what I was suggesting for a while.
“How much and how long?”
“It mostly depends on how long it takes to get graphics, colors, and fonts designed. Since the structure itself is on the individual pages, I suggest leaving that alone. I can start hiding and securing the corporate site materials right away. If I can get graphics soon, I can have everything changed over in two weeks. Remember, this is only going to affect the sites and site portions that mimic the Twins. MLB has to take care of itself,” I said.
“That’s as far as my concern extends,” Dave said. “Maybe you can sell the solution to the league, too. More likely, though, the league will just copy what we are doing. They do that a lot.”
“Good luck to them on that,” I laughed. “The idea here is to disable copying. We’ll see how it goes.”
“Go to work,” Dave said. “After the game tonight, I mean. Most of the coeds are waking up about now, so you’d better head to the beach for your nap.”
Good idea.
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