It appears you weren't at any commission meetings this past year where CPW addressed bots getting tags. There isn't anything illegal about it. The software is very similar to the same software third parties use to get thousands of concert tags. Venues drop tickets at a certain time on a certain day and it's first come first serve for tickets very similar to how CPW does tags. There is a reason these sights are able to obtain thousands of tags and resell them for high mark up. CPW's site has some of the worst coding ever and anyone worth their salt would never admit to building or working on anything like that. By the way the premium tags that hit the list are going for way more than 200 dollars
. Some of those tags are worth 10,000 or more. Guys will pay a premium to skip the line and hunt a great unit every year. I suggest you fill out a CORA request and you will see that it is humanely impossible for the speed and quantity that these tags are getting purchased.
Do you have a source for any of this? I would be very interested to see:
1. Actual links to forum posts that show this is happening (not discussing it... actually offering it, showing screen shots of actual purchases made, etc).
2. A source for the CPW discussion on bot activity. The only reference I can find is them discussing peoples'
concerns that it's happening, not discussing that it
actually is.
3. Any solid evidence of any kind of even a single case where this has proven to have happened.
4. Any evidence of any kind of an offer being made to provide this kind of service. (Apparently despite this being a very common thing, 100% of hunters who have used these services have stayed quiet about it. I assume it must be happening in private messages because I've never seen a post offering it.)
Before we go further, let's clarify two things:
1. CPW did not build and does not run cpwshop.com. They outsourced that to Aspira. I'll grant you they could do a better job, but let's be clear about who we're talking about.
2. Let's put to bed the concept that "it's not disallowed, and should be." If we assume for the sake of the argument this is actually happening (at a scale enough to be worth addressing) the
BOTS Act from 2016 would easily cover this. Also, plenty of online service providers have used other laws like the DMCA to go after bot-driven abuses of their platforms. Aspira wouldn't need any regs to support doing that.
Look, I could probably write something like this myself. But there are enough technical challenges (overcoming QueueIt is probably a 40+ hour task on its own for a reasonably talented hacker) that it would be costly to develop so they'd have to be turning a hell of a profit to make it worthwhile.
And consider the other side.
Tags are not transferable. For this to work, you'd have to provide the hacker with your CPW creds
and your credit card info (Aspira doesn't let you save that).
Guys, look. None of us is proving anything to one another and I admit that I'm not proving anything, either. Believe whatever you want, and if it makes you feel better to blame "the bots" when you don't get the tags you want, fine. All I'm saying is, as one hunter to another, please, please do not provide ANYBODY that offers a "service" like this your a) money, b) personal info, and/or c) your credit card information. It is IMO almost certainly a scam and I'd hate to see anyone get taken by it. Desperation is what criminals want and frustration over not getting the tags you want makes you a perfect target.
By the way there is a very interesting form of this type of scam that could make you believe very strongly that the bots are real because tags DO get purchased - and still have it be a scam.
This is just one example, but there is a form of this con in which there are no "bots" at all - it's just 50 guys in a warehouse in Bangladesh all using proxies to make their traffic appear to come from the US. It's still a scam but it turns doubters into believers because a purchase does actually get made. I would bet a box of donuts that if any of these offerings turns out to be a real lead, that this is how they're doing it. It's honestly just so cheap to hire those people that it's often not even worth writing the code for a bot in the first place.
