I have been in the business of selling concert and sporting event tickets for twenty years. Once ticket sales started taking place primarily over the Internet, mass quantity buyers became a major issue. It has since been a constant struggle to stay a step ahead of people and businesses that wish to buy up all of the tickets for a given event and sell them at a much higher price, which ultimately leads to empty seats and upset performers. CAPTCHAs surfaced and worked OK for a bit, but quickly became useless. Soon after, though, an awesome solution became available. A telephone verification service, such as that provided by TeleSign, works really well in stopping massive ticket buyouts. The service by TeleSign creates a very significant hurdle; people wishing to buy hundreds of tickets are required to provide many phone numbers! Each phone number must be working and immediately available as well. A customer encountering the telephone verification service is first asked for a phone number and then sent an automated message or SMS message containing a PIN. The PIN is then entered to complete the order. Since we started using TeleSign for telephone verification, the occurrence of massive ticket buy outs has been reduced to zero!