Inquiry finds sales of concert tickets are a ‘fixed game’

In one example cited by Schneiderman, a single broker bought 1,012 tickets in one minute to a December 8, 2014 concert of the band U2, despite a claim by the ticket vendor that there was a four-ticket limit.

Not just because he’s popular but the New York Attorney General says MSG tickets for a number of events and concerts have been given to online retailers before available to the public.

Numerous brokers illegally reselling large numbers of tickets were unlicensed, according to the report. M.S.M.S.S. of Manhattan received $80,000 in penalties, and Extra Base Tickets, of Garden City, New York, handed over $65,000.

“In a statement, Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation Entertainment, said that it cooperated with the investigation and that the company supported the attorney general’s efforts to manage bots and the elimination of the paperless ticketing ban”. The New York Attorney General’s Office examined the ticket fees of 150 venues and found that convenience charges and service and processing fees could add an average of 21 percent to the cost of a ticket. Unlike paper tickets and electronic tickets that are freely transferrable from the buyer to another person, non-transferrable paperless tickets require an event attendee to present the credit card that was used to purchase the ticket.

Some brokers use illegal specialty software, called “ticket bots”, to quickly purchase as many desirable tickets as possible for resale at significant markups, they said.

The review found that on on average, more than half of all tickets – 54 percent – are reserved for so-called insiders.

If you were to check ticket reselling sites (like StubHub) shortly after an event sells out you’ll see there could be hundreds, if not thousands of tickets already on sale with prices marked up considerably. The report also shows that bots have been able to buy more than 90 percent of the best seats to any given show. By day’s end, that broker and one other had 15,000 tickets to U2’s North American shows. Unfortunately, competition-driven savings meant to benefit fans have instead been converted to profits for a handful of savvy middlemen using multiple employees or computers, or illegal Bots.

Schneiderman and several other states attorneys general are investigating the NFL and its teams that encourage, and sometimes require, ticket holders to use Ticketmaster’s “NFL Ticket Exchange” platform to re-sell tickets they want to dump. “This investigation is just the beginning of our efforts to create a level playing field in the ticket industry”, he said. In particular, price floors may make it impossible to obtain tickets on the team-promoted Ticket Exchange platform for below face value when demand decreases.

And defeating bots has also proved hard.