"Speed up ticket grab" trap: If you want to grab a train ticket, someone may want to grab your money
Author: Southern England
Tomb-sweeping Festival is approaching. In order to ensure that he can buy the train ticket to go home during the holiday, Mr. Yao set up an appointment to grab the ticket through the "Transportation-Train Ticket Ticket" in WeChat in advance on March 14.
He noticed that every time he opened the page, the system always popped up a reminder that the payment "acceleration" would make the ticket grabbing success rate higher.
But Mr. Yao did not choose to pay for the "accelerated" ticket-grabbing service.
On March 20th, the ticket he booked formally entered the ticket-grabbing time.
Facing the "ticket grabbing" prompt displayed by the system, he had the idea of "just add some money to buy an'speed up' to improve the efficiency of ticket grabbing", but when he clicked on the ticket purchase page, he found that the number of trains and seats he had reserved It was displayed as "Tickets", so he immediately placed an order and successfully purchased the tickets.
At this time, the system that has been prompting to add money to "speed up" still displays "Ticket grabbing".
If it hadn’t happened to take another look at the trip information on the ticket purchase page, Mr. Yao would not only pay for the “acceleration” fee, and wait for the system to give him a ticket grab result, then he might still miss the ticket.
What puzzles him is, why is there a ticket, but the WeChat ticketing platform prompts that there is no ticket, and the ticket is still not available after the ticket-grabbing procedure is activated?
Shouldn't it be a first-come-first-served ticket to buy a ticket?
If the so-called "acceleration" is carried out without adding money, is the ordinary "ticket grabbing" procedure essentially invalid?
Is this inducing consumers to purchase paid "accelerated" ticket-grabbing services?
On the train ticket booking page of a certain platform, "Star Speed Tickets" requires a fee of 40 yuan per person, and the "Star Speed Tickets Card" three times in 30 days is priced at 45 yuan. Photojournalist/Zhang Jian
The transportation department predicts that the Ching Ming holiday will usher in the first peak of travel after the Spring Festival this year.
Affected by this, there are no tickets for the Beijing-Wuhan high-speed rail and Beijing-Zhengzhou high-speed rail. According to the Guangzhou Railway Group's estimates, during the Qingming period, the Guangzhou Railway will send more than 2 million passengers a day, an increase of more than 80% over the current passenger flow.
This means that more people will participate in the paid "accelerated" ticket grabbing.
There is a ticket, but it is still prompted to "grab"
Mr. Yao’s experience is not alone.
Mr. Xiao is the marketing director of a company in Changsha. Due to his work, he needs to travel frequently. He usually buys train tickets on the 12306 platform.
Before the National Day last year, he needed to go on a business trip to Guangzhou, but found that his account has not been able to log in to 12306, so he had to go to WeChat's "Transportation-Train Ticket Ticket" (operated by Same Trip Travel) to buy a ticket, but that process made him So far, he said, "It's too bad, don't say more money, I almost missed something."
According to Mr. Xiao’s recollection, the WeChat train ticket purchase system at that time showed that all the trains on the date he selected were "no tickets", making him both anxious and suspicious, "According to my experience, there has never been a time period for Changsha to go south to Guangzhou. There are no tickets for all the trains and seats." But he had to follow the system prompts to join the "ticket grabbing" team. After several hours of grabbing tickets without results, he paid the "speed up" money again, but he never grabbed the ticket. Arrival.
The dramatic scene occurred when a colleague told him that he had bought a train ticket at 12306 a few hours ago, "I was blinded, (colleagues successfully purchased the ticket) At that time, I was still screaming at the time to'speed up' the ticket. He was there. After hearing that I was still grabbing tickets, I immediately looked at 12306, and it showed that there were more tickets—and there were more than one. You said it was weird, right?" What made him shout weird even more was that when a colleague was still talking on the phone When buying a ticket for him, "I finally got the ticket here."
This process that made Mr. Xiao dumbfounded caused him to spend an extra 40 yuan "accelerated" fee.
He is still puzzled by this, "Obviously there are tickets, but the (WeChat purchase train ticket system) prompts that there are no tickets. Are you saying that there is a problem with their technology, or do you deliberately do it?"
The 1℃ reporter of China Business News found in the investigation that, at present, there are third-party ticket purchasing platforms that have paid "accelerated" ticket rush services. In addition to the "train ticket" in WeChat, there are also Ctrip.com, Tongcheng.com and Qunar and other large platforms.
Among them, the service provider bound to the train ticket purchase service on the WeChat platform is Tongcheng Yilong.
In the "Questionnaire survey on train ticket grabbing at China Business News 1℃", the number of people who chose WeChat platform and Ctrip to buy train tickets was the largest, accounting for 25%, respectively, and Tongcheng.com ranked second and third. Qunar and Qunar accounted for 12.5% and 10.42% respectively, and other platforms accounted for 27.08%.
The results of the questionnaire survey showed that during the peak holiday season, 75% of the students participated in ticket grabbing.
During the ticket grabbing process, nearly 90% of the students noticed the paid "accelerated" ticket grabbing service automatically popped up by the system on the third-party ticketing platform.
However, it is worth noting that the results of the questionnaire survey show that only 16.67% of students are willing to choose the paid "accelerated" ticket rush service after seeing the paid "accelerated" ticket rush service automatically popped up by the system.
The students who participated in the questionnaire survey said, “I feel that this is a process that requires constant expenditure of money, which is a pitfall” and “I feel cheated.”
According to a survey conducted by a reporter from China Business News 1℃, different platforms charge different fees with regard to paying to "accelerate" ticket grabbing.
For example, on the WeChat platform, its "speed of light grab ticket" paid "accelerated" ticket grab service sometimes pops up for 50 yuan/person, and sometimes it is 40 yuan/person.
After the purchase, if consumers want to continue to "accelerate", they can also purchase an acceleration package of 10 yuan per copy; and if they want to reach the highest level of VIP, they also need an acceleration package of 10 yuan per copy.
On March 26, a reporter from China Business News 1℃ bought a hard sleeper ticket from Guangzhou to Haikou on March 31 on the WeChat platform. The original price was 285 yuan. After "accelerating" to VIP, the ticket price became 345. yuan.
A similar situation of "accelerating" the continuous increase of money also appears on Ctrip.com, Tongcheng.com, and Qunar.com.
On these platforms, after paying for "accelerated" ticket grabbing, the system will show a road to "accelerate" by increasing money continuously.
For example, Ctrip showed on the Internet: low speed, fast speed, high speed, extreme speed, speed of light, VIP.
The Ctrip system shows that "high-speed ticket grabbing" is 20 yuan per copy, but to accelerate to "extreme speed" you need to add 16 yuan, to accelerate to "speed of light" to add 30 yuan, and to accelerate to "VIP" you need to add 88 yuan. The corresponding service is to issue tickets first when tickets are available.
But it's not that adding money will ensure that you get the ticket.
Recently, the 1℃ reporter of China Business News conducted a questionnaire survey of 48 college students in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Hainan, Sichuan, Jiangsu and other places. "Ticket-grabbing service, in the end, it was still unable to get a ticket.
The so-called ticket grabbing is mainly for "standby tickets."
Regarding the waiting tickets, according to the National Railway Administration 12306, when the tickets are sold out, the user can prepay the fare and submit the replacement ticket; if there are more tickets, the system will automatically allocate the tickets according to the waiting queue order.
This means that no matter which third-party software platform is used for ticket purchase or ticket grabbing, it will eventually be "queued" in sequence in the background of the 12306 train ticket reservation system. The paid "accelerated" ticket grabbing service for consumers is only improved. The odds of winning a ticket may not necessarily be able to get a ticket.
The customer service of Ctrip.com and Tongcheng.com both stated to the reporter of China Business News 1℃ on the phone that paying for “accelerated” ticket grabbing does not guarantee 100% ticket grabbing.
However, one of the customer service staff said that purchasing an acceleration package by paying can increase the level of ticket grabbing assistance. The higher the level, the higher the success rate. "The system will help you swipe the tickets changed or refunded by other passengers, and we will try our best to grab the tickets."
Technical destruction
“From a purely technical point of view, this kind of ticket-grabbing software can increase the success rate of ticket-grabbing.” Yan Huaizhi, director of the Institute of Computer Network Attack and Defense, Beijing Institute of Technology, told a reporter from China Business News. “In actual ticket purchases, Indeed, there are consumers who have grabbed high-speed rail tickets in this way."
"This kind of ticket-grabbing software mostly uses web crawlers to log in to the high-speed rail ticketing network and crawl the ticketing information, and then supplement it with batch, automated, and high-speed ticket purchase processes, so that manual ticket purchases can be obtained with millisecond refreshes. Unattainable information and speed advantages." Yan Huaizhi said.
He explained to the CBN 1℃ reporter that the underlying technology of the ticket-grabbing software is not complicated. In layman's terms, it is to speed up the software to simulate the manual ticket purchase process, and initiate ticket purchase requests repeatedly until it succeeds.
From the perspective of the operation process, the ticket-grabbing software first simulates manual ticket purchase, including logging in to the account, querying the ticket source, entering the ticket purchase information, generating the order and completing the payment, and finally obtaining the ticket source.
Regarding the underlying technology of software ticket grabbing, the customer service of Ctrip and Tongcheng.com both told CBN 1°C reporters that they both have their own ticket grabbing software system, but they do not know the underlying technology as a customer service.
Shan Xinghua, deputy chief engineer of the Electronics Institute of China Academy of Railway Sciences Group Co., Ltd. and director of the 12306 technical department, previously stated that 12306 has a risk prevention and control system. If someone accesses the server at a high and frequent speed, it will be regarded as an abnormal operation. Will be intercepted or dragged into a slow queue.
In other words, getting tickets through third-party software platforms may sometimes be slower.
"Sometimes using'speed up' to grab tickets is not as fast as you can do it yourself," a college student said in the "Questionnaire Survey on Train Tickets Grabbing at 1°C of China Business News."
"A large number of paid'accelerated' ticket-grabbing services objectively aggravated the difficulty for ordinary consumers to buy tickets, greatly damaged the service quality of ticketing websites for the general public, and even undermined the general public's ticket purchase experience." Yan Huaizhi believes This kind of behavior is essentially a kind of unfair competition. It is based on the partial profits of individual paying users and third-party purchasing agents. It sacrifices the interests of the wider community. It will not only affect the operation of normal ticketing websites. The impact of this has disrupted the normal order of ticket purchases and artificially caused social injustice.
Yan Huaizhi introduced to a reporter from China Business News that the ticketing website has taken a series of countermeasures against this improper ticket grabbing method, such as restricting specific account logins, limiting refresh times, and establishing blacklist databases. In order to eliminate the impact of ticket grabbing software on ordinary consumers' ticket purchases as much as possible.
To this end, the ticket-grabbing software has also adopted a series of countermeasures, by changing the IP and using multiple accounts to "disguise" and "make a facelift" to continue to seek the success of ticket-grabbing, which in fact resulted in the acceleration of software ticket-grabbing and ticket sales. The "confrontation" between the two website services in cyberspace.
From a broad perspective, it is not an exaggeration to say that ticket-grabbing software uses hacker-like "attack" techniques.
Eighty percent of college students who accepted the 1℃ questionnaire survey of China Business News believe that the existence of paid accelerated ticket grabbing services is unreasonable.
Some of them said, "Tickets should be bought first, come first," but in the end they were "changed to earn everyone's money" by a third party; some students interviewed said that this was suspected of "forced consumption"; others said that if Everyone chooses to pay to "accelerate" the ticket-grabbing service, and the result will be "trapped in this system."
Mr. Xiao, who has had a bad experience in "speeding up" tickets, agrees with the saying "all trapped in the system" among college students.
"If everyone believes in the saying that adding money can increase the rate of votes, and all spending money to'speed up', it is equivalent to returning to the same starting line. What is the difference between not adding money?"
"I don't think this kind of technology is a so-called value-added service, but its destructiveness is obvious." In Mr. Xiao's view, "speeding up" ticket grabbing first undermines the principle of fairness, "It's like normal rules and regulations. Moments lined up to buy tickets, but suddenly someone jumped in the queue, and this person was still collecting money to help people jump in the queue. You say it's fair and unfair? We at least say that this is an unqualified behavior in daily life, right?"
Grey area
Starting in 2019, the 12306 platform has launched the official “alternate ticket grabbing” function, but has never authorized any third-party website or software to conduct ticket sales service, has no priority purchase channels, and has not cooperated with any company to develop ticket purchase software.
But up to now, the relevant departments have not made clear regulations on the ticket-grabbing software industry, and services such as paying to “accelerate” ticket-grabbing are still in a gray area in law.
Some people call this kind of ticket-grabbing behavior on the network platform "electronic scalpers."
Yan Huaizhi believes that there is no substantive difference between individuals acting as a scalper to grab tickets for profit, and from a third-party platform to grab tickets for profit.
"Our law does not prohibit charging certain commissions to provide normal ticket purchasing behavior. However, normal ticket purchasing is fundamentally different from the use of technical means to implement online ticket grabbing. At present, users are authorized to use real customer information and use technology. How to qualitatively qualitatively obtain votes based on advantages is a vague area in law, and it is difficult to define in theory and practice."
Xue Jun, a professor at Peking University Law School and director of Peking University’s E-commerce Law Research Center, said in an interview with a reporter from China Business News that the third-party ticketing platform designs special software to quickly obtain the remaining balance of ticketing websites in real time. Tickets and refund information, so as to help users buy tickets with a higher probability of shortage of trains. If this service does not involve the use of hackers and other technical means to invade or interfere with the normal ticket sales service of the ticket purchase website, this should be a kind of consumption The service provided by the author is understandable.
However, Xue Jun also said that if the underlying technology of this kind of “accelerated” ticket-grabbing software will affect the normal operation of the 12306 website in actual operation, such as excessively intensive and frequent data crawling on the website, it will cause The operation of 12306 is not smooth, and the access difficulty of normal users has increased, which requires attention.
"There needs to be a reasonable limit." He said, "You can't base your own value-added service model on the basis of causing harm to the normal operation of other people's websites."
As far as the nature of software services is concerned, Xue Jun believes that the paid "accelerated" ticket-grabbing service of third-party platforms is somewhat different from the previous "scalpers".
"The'scalper' buys the tickets in advance, hoards them in their hands, and then sells them at a higher price." He told China Business News 1℃, "The paid accelerated ticket rush service is commissioned by people who need to buy tickets, according to the latter. Designated trains, through certain technical means, have a higher probability of buying tickets for popular trains. Third-party platforms that provide ticket-grabbing services will not stock up on train tickets in advance, which artificially creates tension between supply and demand. So two There are still certain differences."
In Yan Huaizhi's view, if the purchase fee for ticket rushing exceeds the normal commission range, it is suspected of reselling the ticket source.
"What's more, if a third-party purchasing agent website uses a large amount of other people's information to stock up a large number of ticket sources in advance, when a customer who really needs it asks for the purchase, first release the false ticket source by refunding the ticket, and then take advantage of the technology. Quickly "snatch back" the ticket source to paying consumers who have real travel needs who entrust it to purchase, so that it is suspected of illegally hoarding tickets and reselling them for illegal profit, which is naturally not allowed by the law." He said.
As early as 2013, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Railways at the time asked to block the "ticket-grabbing artifact" of software vendors, believing that this was an act of forcible jamming.
But over the years, this kind of "ticket grabbing artifact" has become bigger and bigger on the WeChat platform, Ctrip.com, Tongcheng.com, Qunar.com and other large platforms.