Japanese ticketing company eplus has claimed success with a new system introduced to counter the issue of bots buying up multiple tickets for major events.
Eplus purchased the security program from US-based Akamai Technologies and has reaped instant rewards, according to the Asahi Shimbun.
The Japanese newspaper has secured data from eplus which illustrates a major win for the company on May 12, the first Saturday after the new system was introduced.
Thirty minutes after the tickets went on sale, about 500,000 purchase applications had been submitted. However, the eplus security program flagged up that about 450,000 of those applications originated from a buy-up program created by a single individual which created 800 accounts and tried to buy tickets from 480 locations around Japan.
Masaharu Konishi, the eplus official in charge of the computer system for the company, told Asahi Shimbun that the huge amount of rejected applications initially led him to believe that it may have made an error and was rejecting legitimate attempts to purchase tickets.
However, detailed analysis of the attempted purchases a few days later concluded that a single individual had created those accounts.
Eplus added that access continued with improved versions of the blocked program, but said that further measures has blocked the bot-based program since August 22.
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