Investigators target National Football League over ticket resale

The Daily News reported Wednesday on its website that the probe found that 54% of all tickets to hot concerts are set aside for industry insiders or pre-sale customers before they are offered to the general public.

Investigations have identified the brokers re-selling the most tickets for NY events, and almost all the brokers were unlicensed, and several had employed illegal ticket bots to buy tickets, according to the report.

The attorney general also has reached settlements with two ticket brokers – MSMSS, LLC and Extra Base Tickets, LLC – operating without a re-seller license. The settlements require one company to pay $80,000 United States and the other $65,000 US. One broker, the report says, bought 1,012 tickets on December 14th, 2014, to a U2 performance at Madison Square Garden, even though the vendor had posted a four-ticket limit; within a day, that broker and a colleague had racked up more than 15,000 tickets to the band’s shows.

“Ticketing, to put it bluntly, is a fixed game”, Schneiderman wrote in the report.

Investigators found that third-party brokers resell tickets on sites like StubHub and TicketsNow at average margins of 49 percent above face-value and sometimes more than 10 times the price.

Schneiderman said Thursday the ny state law “has been amended to require only reasonable fees for special services. and these fees are excessive”.

“Overall, (Schneiderman) believes there is little to say in favor of price floors”, the report says.

A LiveNation/AEG analysis, referenced in the AG’s report, showed that, on average, less than half of all seats for major events are ever made available to the general public. If you’ve made a purchase from Ticketmaster or LiveNation, you’re well aware that a $75 ticket to see your favorite artist will likely cost you closer to $100 in the end. The investigation confirms that hundreds of thousands of tickets are being acquired using illegal software.

The practice also harms consumers, according to Schneiderman., who said the price floor established by the NFL Ticket Exchange can fool buyers into thinking they are paying market prices.

“Even Pope Francis, when he came to NY, whose events were all to be free, could not escape seeing tickets to his events being re-sold for profit”.

Schneiderman’s report also said the official ticket-exchange platform “is frequently billed as the official resale site and the only “safe” place to buy secondary National Football League tickets”, per the Associated Press. In 2013, another automated purchaser obtained 520 tickets to a Beyoncé concert at the Barclays Center in 2013 in three minutes.