The Scalper’s World

From a down-and-out college student forging diplomas to the king of ticket scalpers controlling Shanghai’s gray-market industries;

From a lackey fleeing through the streets with fake tickets to a tech kingpin using AI to hack ticketing systems;

From an opportunist exploiting policy loopholes to a desperate outlaw crushed beneath the wheels of history: Lin Mo’s rise and fall over more than a decade was a grain of sand in China’s breakneck era.

In the early 2000s, he spotted a business opportunity in the cracks of concert ticketing. Sham marriages to speculate on housing, trading stocks through nominee accounts, reselling tickets to the World Expo... Every gap in policy amid an economic boom became a secret to getting rich.

From pagers and macro software to AI ticket-buying bots, he used each new technology to arm his greed. But he buried his conscience in the mask profiteering of the SARS outbreak, then watched his mentor die beneath the World Expo fireworks.

When an opportunity to take photos of license plates for the free-trade zone beckoned, this “godfather of the industry,” worth hundreds of millions, suddenly realized that the pickaxe he had once used to strike gold had long since become a guillotine wielded by the times.

Policies tightened, technology closed in, and a regulatory iron curtain fell. The fertile ground that had nurtured scalpers was turning barren.

This is not the story of one person’s crime and punishment, but of an entire industry’s rise and fall.

Social development gave this industry the soil in which to grow;

And ongoing social development would eventually sweep it away beneath the tide of the times.

When the underworld of speculators was leveled by the rule of law, those legends of risking everything for money were no more than specks of dust shaken loose as the times moved on.

And the love and pain consumed by easy money had long since vanished, along with broken promises, in the never-ending neon glow of Shanghai.

This book is a work of realist fiction. There is no transmigration, no golden finger, and no fantasy.

It simply tells part of an ordinary person’s life.