Here’s a million-dollar idea for a young, budding entrepreneur: a ticket purchasing website that doesn’t also gouge users.
In other words, the opposite of Ticketmaster, which reportedly has been robbing us blind, according to CBC News and the Toronto Star.
“Box-office giant Ticketmaster is recruiting professional scalpers who cheat its own system to expand its resale business and squeeze more money out of fans,” the newsrooms alleged in a report this week, explaining they sent a “pair of reporters undercover to Ticket Summit 2018, a ticketing and live entertainment convention at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.”
“Posing as scalpers and equipped with hidden cameras, the journalists were pitched on Ticketmaster’s professional re-seller program,” the report added. “Company representatives told them Ticketmaster’s resale division turns a blind eye to scalpers who use ticket-buying bots and fake identities to snatch up tickets and then resell them on the site for inflated prices. Those pricey resale tickets include extra fees for Ticketmaster.”
Woof.
One sales representative reportedly told the undercover duo, “I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred accounts. It’s not something that we look at or report.”
Put more simply, Ticketmaster has reportedly been working with scalpers who buy up tickets in batches, and then re-sell them with a markup on a Ticketmaster-owned platform called TradeDesk. Ticketmaster than collects on the higher fees on top of what it got for selling the original tickets.
Interestingly enough, as noted by Rolling Stone magazine, Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation, has “sued groups in the past for using bots to grab up live events tickets from its site, which prompted counterclaims that Ticketmaster was itself supplying scalpers with bot software — which … TradeDesk appears to be doing.”
Ticketmaster, for its part, responded to the story by stating it is “categorically untrue” that it has any program in place to enable re-sellers to acquire large volumes of tickets.
Yeah, well, that’s what a scalper would say. Maybe.
The ticket-selling website also said it launched an internal review of “professional re-seller accounts” and “employee practices” prior to the news reports.
