Most are held for the venue, the performer, the promoter or for pre-sale to insiders.
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Two ticket bots were shown to have bought 15,087 tickets on December 8, 2014, for twenty U2 in the same tour across North America. The settlements require that the companies and their principals maintain a ticket reseller license and pay penalties for having operated illegally.
Bots are purchasing concert tickets in NY at an extremely high rate, but the practice is illegal. Mass digital buyers can quickly pick up these scraps, essentially cornering the market and charging exorbitant markups on resale sites.
The report said many NFL teams encourage or even require ticket holders to use Ticketmaster’s NFL Ticket Exchange platform, where the seller is prohibited from cutting the price below face value.
The report, called “Why Can’t New Yorkers Get Tickets?”, describes how automated bots make buying large numbers of tickets to major events easy. The report also urges the state’s Legislature remove its restrictions on paperless ticketing, which is created to put the kibosh on scalpers, but is rendered ineffective due to the requirement that shows offering nontransferable paperless tickets is also required to offer them in transferable form, undercutting their goal. A “young software developer”, working with a broker that made $42 million in 2013 selling $31 million in tickets on StubHub, used an optical-character-recognition program to purchase hundreds of thousands of tickets.
On average, the investigation found that more than half of all tickets – 54 percent – are reserved for insiders. “Ticketing is a fixed game”, Schneiderman said in a statement accompanying his infuriating report on Big Ticket. Their CEO, Don Vaccaro, continued, “Like TicketNetwork, the Attorney General supports fair pricing and keeping general public access to games affordable, and we will happily continue to work with his office to ensure customers are treated fairly”.
“I’ve been in the live music and events business for twenty years and over that time I’ve seen technology have a positive impact on our industry. There’s just no way ordinary fans can compete with that”, Schneiderman said at a news conference in Buffalo Thursday.
And defeating bots has also proved hard.
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The source familiar with the National Football League antitrust probe, who asked not to be identified because of the non-public nature of the matter, said it was spurred by a flood of complaints about use of the illegal software known as ticket bots. “That is true of Amazon and Etsy, and it is also typically true even of vendors of airline tickets, like Expedia and Priceline”.
