Fans Are Getting Ripped Off by Scalpers Using Bots – It’s Time to Investigate

05/31/2012

News Channel 5 in Nashville is reporting on our call to investigate the illegal use of ticket bots in Tennessee:

We’ve long opposed the use of ticket bots – automated ticket buying programs that jump the line to purchase hundreds of tickets in seconds. Anti-bot provisions are a core tenet of our Fan Bill of Rights, and we’ve made serious efforts to engage Ticketmaster and other ticket companies to lead an industry-wide fight against bot programs. Unfortunately, those calls have been met with silence.

As the largest primary ticket seller in the country – and a near monopoly within the industry – Ticketmaster is in a unique position to quantify the bot problem and help authorities identify offenders. For example, for a recent Eric Church concert in Nashville, a ticket manifest revealed that scalpers snapped up 75% of all available tickets. Over 200 tickets were purchased by a single person despite a “four ticket limit” advertised on Ticketmaster’s website.

The disconnect between what Ticketmaster knows, and what it is doing to curb the problem, raises troubling questions:

• If Ticketmaster knows when bots are used to purchase tickets, why aren’t they stopping those sales and reporting those individuals to authorities?
• If scalpers aren’t using bots, is Ticketmaster colluding with them in some way to divert tickets to the secondary market (as we’ve seen Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation do in the UK)?

Fans deserve a fair chance to buy tickets to the games and concerts they love at face value. We hope the Tennessee Attorney General’s office answers our calls to investigate both the scalpers who are using bot programs to cheat fans, and why Ticketmaster continues to allow these illegal ticket purchases.