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Comment by pearlsteinj | Hacker News Reader

I was curious the last time I sold tickets so actually called them asked about this. The emails are aliases to verify the tickets are valid, then they are forwarded to the buyer.

Usually the format is <email prefix of buyer>@<stubhub controlled domain> and the tickets are forwarded pretty quickly. This way stubhub can actually validate you sent over a PDF + the contents of those PDFs or images if the buyer disputes delivery.

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but why would they use shady looking domain names for this?

Totally just guessing: Maybe to reduce inbound spam that's forwarded to the buyers? If it was one central email address, spammers could just send a ton of images/PDFs to all known prefixes of that central domain, but needing to guess the prefix + right domain adds a layer of indirection? They may not do much validation on the forwarded tickets, just store it for disputes

Wouldn't it be much cheaper and effective to add a random secret to the bit before the at rather than after?

I’d guess so that ticketmaster etc. can’t identify which tickets are being sold via StubHub. If the domains were identifiable, ticketmaster could block the transfers.

But if StubHub (MarkMonitor Inc.) is visible in WHOIS, then ticketmaster could do a `whois emeraldsummitadvisors.com` and block still block it?

Cat and mouse game with Ticketmaster team..... next up anonymous registrations.

Yeah. That's a slightly more expensive endeavour. The question is is they can scale enough the number of domains and connect to send emails. New domains + not known can have not so good sending reputation. If they use low number of domains, Ticketmaster could start blocking new domains with more than average number of ticket purchases.

Shady looking domain names are usually cheap and available?

That's my best guess at least.

To most people it isn't shady looking? It gives the feeling that you're emailing a person, which might be what they're going for.

That makes no sense, why wouldnt it just be @stubhub.com or @stubhubtickets.com

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