SCALPERS’ DELIGHT
Ticketmaster jacked up revs using bots: report
The devil appeared to be in the details of a deep-dive probe into Ticketmaster sales of a Bruno Mars concert, suggesting the company hired bots to buy tickets and resell them on its own secondary market.
Ticketmaster uses scalpers and ticket-snagging bots to increase its revenue — moves that also pump up ticket prices for concertgoers, according to an explosive report out Thursday.
The ticket-selling division of Live Nation furnishes scalpers with sophisticated software that allows them to buy tickets from Ticketmaster — providing the ticketing company a fee, according to the report by the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Co.) and the Toronto Star.
The scalpers then use Ticketmaster’s TradeDesk, its invite-only ticket reselling platform, to place the tickets on popular sites like StubHub or Vivid Seat, according to the weeks-long investigative report.
When concertgoers fork over cash for the tickets, often at a price well above the original, a piece of the fee goes back to Ticketmaster.
The two media outlets focused on a Bruno Mars concert last weekend in Toronto.
There, posing as scalpers and outfitted with hidden cameras, the reporters were advised by TradeDesk reps to sync their accounts to their proprietary system in order to boost ticket sales above limits imposed by Ticketmaster itself.
Ticketmaster’s terms of use limit the number of tickets, usually to under a dozen, any customer can buy for a single event.
But TradeDesk promised the faux scalpers that Ticketmaster’s resale division turns a blind eye to the use of bots and fake identities by scalpers hoarding tickets in violation of company terms.
“We don’t spend any time looking at your Ticketmaster.com account,” one rep said. “There’s total separation between Ticketmaster and our division. … Wedon’t monitor that at all.”
Ticketmaster, with a history of suing scalpers, is embroiled in a $10 million federal suit in California that accuses three rivals of unfairly bulking up on tickets to “Hamilton” and boxing events by using technology that circumvents its resale rules.
OnThursday, in a statement to The Post, Ticketmaster said it is “categorically untrue that Ticketmaster has any program in place to enable resellers to acquire large volumes of tickets at the expense of consumers.”
As for the Trade Desk presenter who pitched the undercover journalists, Ticketmaster said: “We do not condone the statements made by the employee as the conduct described clearly violates our terms of service.”
The investigation revealed the economics of Ticketmaster’s alleged scalping activities to be lucrative.
“If Ticketmaster collects $25.75 on a $209.50 ticket on the initial sale, when the owner posts it for resale for $400 on the site, the company stands to collect an additional $76 on the same ticket,” CBC News said in its report.
The University of Toronto’s Richard Powers told the Canadian broadcaster that Ticketmaster appears to be abusing what’s very close to a ticket-selling monopoly.
“Helping to create a secondary market where purchasers are duped into paying higher prices, and securing themselves a second commission, should be illegal,” he said.
CBCNews also approached music journalist Alan Cross, who declared, ”This is going to be a public relations nightmare.”