Ticket resale
They make a business out of securing hard-to-find and previously sold-out tickets that are no longer available through the official box office.
One common concern with resale is with scam artists selling fake tickets to unsuspecting buyers.
In recent years, fraudsters have started to use more complex methods by which they obtain tickets for resale on the secondary market.
Similar to the technology used to snatch up rare shoes and sneakers,[6] automated bot attacks have become a common way to acquire large numbers of tickets only to resell them for higher profits.
Fraudsters will deploy thousands of bots from untraceable IP addresses in a brute force attack as soon as a venue or ticket seller first makes them available for sale.
In 2017, one of the largest online ticket sellers Ticketmaster filed a lawsuit against Prestige Entertainment for their continued use of scalper bots despite paying $3.35 million to the New York Attorney General's Office just a year prior.
Ticket brokers operate out of offices and use the internet and phone call centers to conduct their business.
These sites act as marketplaces that allow users to purchase tickets from a large network of brokers.
The American corporate ticket reselling firm Ticketmaster developed a strong online presence and made several acquisitions to compete in the secondary markets.
According to Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch, many online ticket resellers use URLs that are similar to official box-office websites and sometimes imply via their texts or their pictures that they are official, use internet advertising to increase traffic to their website, and avoid clearly stating the real prices that are charged for a ticket.
After many complaints from the community and event promoters, the Commonwealth Consumer Affairs Advisory Council and NSW Fair Trading conducted a survey discussing scalping issues and released The Ticket Scalping Issue Paper for NSW.
Australian regulations[23] stipulate that ticket resellers must conspicuously display key information to potential buyers.
[25] Effective July 1, 2015, in an effort to protect consumers from purchasing fraudulent tickets, Ontario created an exemption under the Ticket Speculation Act to: Following an announcement in 2016 that The Tragically Hip's lead singer Gord Downie had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, the band held the Man Machine Poem Tour.
In 2011, the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton, declined to pass a law against touting and said that would just drive resellers to websites based abroad.
[31] However, selling tickets in a public place (e.g. outside a venue) is illegal under the Casual Trading Act, 1995 — in 2015 Kazimierz Greń, an official of the Polish Football Association, spent the night in a cell after being arrested for selling tickets outside an Ireland–Poland football match.
[32] In Israel, the Knesset put into effect in 2002 the 67th Amendment to the Israeli Penal Code, enacting Section 194a, which outlaws ticket scalping.
The new addition to the penal code enabled police to fight the ticket scalping of sports and music events, especially the scalpers who bought massive numbers of tickets for the sole purpose of resale and were causing much distress to the public and enabled scalpers to evade paying taxes.
[33] Ticket resale by scalpers above face value is legal in Sweden regardless of limitations that are imposed by event organizers.
[36][37] In July 2016, several prominent music managers in the UK including Ian McAndrew, Harry Magee, Brian Message and Adam Tudhope came together to fund a new initiative called the FanFair Alliance, to work towards tackling the issue of 'industrial-scale online ticket touting'.
[40] Ticket resale on the premises of the event (including adjacent parking lots that are officially part of the facility) may be prohibited by law.
That does not actually get around eBay's selling rules, which effectively state that the goods that the buyer receives are the ones that are sold by the seller, including any free bonuses.
The New York Times reported that could help the agency determine demand for a given event and more effectively compete with ticket resellers.
However, identification of ticket holders is checked when entering and while standing in line and most notably when progressing from the entrance queue into the studio space.
[49] Though scalping is most commonly associated with ticket sales, the process of buying desirable commodities and selling them off for a higher rate has proven lucrative with other items, particularly electronic devices such as mobile phones, video game consoles, and computer hardware.
In some cases, internet resellers have developed automated bots to purchase bulk quantities of newly-released items on e-commerce websites as soon as they become available.
[50] Customers have argued that generates an unfair advantage for the scalpers and adds to an already-controversial practice, and many sites have begun implementing anti-bot measures to combat such tactics.
