NY attorney general investigates National Football League over ticket reselling

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says a ticket industry investigation has found most tickets are never sold to the general public.

Schneiderman is looking into whether pricing rules for National Football League ticket resales are illegal, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the probe isn’t public.

“This investigation is just the beginning of our efforts to create a level playing field in the ticket industry”, Schneiderman said of his findings.

A New York Yankees spokesperson said its voluntary program Yankees Ticket Exchange was set up, in part, because of fraud by principle entities in the secondary market and added that they wondered why the report had no mention of where most significant frauds in the marketplace occurs.

Even tickets to free events, such as Pope Francis’ appearance in Central Park last September, are quickly acquired and resold at high prices on such sites, the report said. The settlements require one company to pay $80,000 USA and the other $65,000 US.

If a season ticket holder has two tickets priced at $100 each, for example, he may be happy to sell them for $50 each just to get some of the investment back, and the market value of the tickets may have fallen that low. The report also shows that bots have been able to buy more than 90 percent of the best seats to any given show. 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 objective.

The report flagged sites such as MyCityRocks and Ticketmaster claiming they regularly tack on fees, which are sometimes more than the face value price of the ticket. “My office will continue to crack down on those who break our laws, prey on ordinary consumers, and deny New Yorkers affordable access to the concerts and sporting events they love”, Schneiderman wrote. By day’s end, that broker and one other had 15,000 tickets to U2’s North American shows. The investigation confirms that hundreds of thousands of tickets are being acquired using illegal software.

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. “It’s what happens when bots are involved, and consumers are left with the choice of not attending events or paying a lot to see their favorite artists”. “I’ve seen bots manipulate the system, hold tickets and ultimately lock average consumers out of the ticket buying process”.

And defeating bots has also proved hard.