Two brothers were arrested on Thursday after they were caught with software they developed and sold and used to buy train tickets from the official ticket website of the Ministry of Railway (MOR), which they also resold to scalpers.
The brothers, surnamed Mo, made more than 1.4 million yuan ($224,560) during the travel rush ahead of Spring Festival, according to a report by The Beijing News on Thursday.
The railway police say the brothers resold 1,777 tickets to seven illicit rings all over China at prices between 50 and several hundred yuan higher than their face values, the railway police announced Wednesday.
They were detained by railway police earlier this month for "destroying a computer system and scalping train tickets."
However, Li Xiujiao, lawyer of the elder Mo, told the Global Times that his client didn't participate in ticket scalping, he only wrote the software.
A source close to the MOR's police bureau told the Global Times on Thursday that the software can generate fake IDs that can trick the booking system, which requires buyers to input their ID information and limits the number of tickets one person can buy.
The software the brothers made was able to purchase all tickets from an entire train in a few minutes, according to The Beijing News report.
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