Ticketmaster vows to crack down on scalper accounts buying most tickets
Ticketmaster, the world’s largest online box office, is promising to crack down on scalpers on an industrial scale for the first time by preventing them from using hundreds — sometimes thousands — of fake Ticketmaster accounts to buy and resell tickets for concerts, theater and sporting events.
The move, announced in a letter to US lawmakers late last week, comes after the US Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit on September. The multimillion-dollar lawsuit accuses Ticketmaster and its parent company, LiveNation, of “illegal ticket resale tactics” and “deceiving artists and consumers regarding pricing and ticket limits.”
Details of the letter were first published by the American music and entertainment magazine Billboard.
For years, fans trying to log onto the Ticketmaster website to purchase their allotted maximum of four or six tickets to see their favorite artists have cursed the inability to purchase face-value seats directly from the box office, noting that scalpers and resellers collect most of the tickets for popular events, only to post them on resale websites at huge markups.
The FTC acknowledges that its lawsuit is based largely on revelations from a 2018 CBC News/Toronto Star investigation, in which journalists undercover as “ticket brokers” exposed how Ticketmaster largely recruited scalpers and knowingly let them use hundreds of fake accounts to avoid ticket purchasing limits.
Look The National: Inside Ticketmaster’s Secret Scalper Program (2018):
Ticketmaster calls the FTC lawsuit “a distorted view of the facts and the law” and plans to challenge the claims in court, yet acknowledges that “ticket brokers” using fake names, fake IP addresses, and bots to maintain large numbers of fake ticket purchasing accounts have become industry standard.
“That ticket brokers are allowed to maintain multiple accounts is true; this conspiracy is bogus,” Daniel M. Wall, executive vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs at Live Nation, wrote in an Oct. 17 letter to U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn and Ben Ray Lujan.
For example, the FTC lawsuit disclosed internal Ticketmaster documents showing that in 2018, five brokers controlled 6,345 Ticketmaster accounts and held 246,407 concert tickets for 2,594 events.
“Certainly, this has gotten out of hand, especially since scalpers have developed automated tools to create Ticketmaster accounts,” Live Nation wrote to US lawmakers. “Given the level of abuse we are seeing now, we are no longer allowing this. This is an injustice to the artists and fans and it is time to do something about it.”
Starting October 17, Ticketmaster has vowed to limit everyone, including brokers, to one Ticketmaster account and use advanced AI security screening to detect fraud.
“Additional accounts will be canceled at the appropriate time,” the company said.
In a letter to US lawmakers, Ticketmaster also announced that it was shutting down part of its TradeDesk platform, a ticket resellers’ inventory management software, and would no longer allow mass resale of concert tickets (although the company has indicated that mass resale of sports and theater tickets may still be allowed).
“We have come to the conclusion that the reputational harm to Ticketmaster from having to explain and defend TradeDesk outweighs its value. Although we believe this criticism is unfair, we are removing TradeDesk’s concert ticket management functionality from the market,” the Live Nation executive wrote.
Undercover journalists documented collusion
While news of Ticketmaster’s promised action may be music to the ears of the Federal Trade Commission and US politicians, a 2018 CBC/Toronto Star exposé revealed the extent to which the company has historically collaborated with scalpers and profited from them.
Reporters went undercover with hidden cameras, posing as small-time ticket brokers asking Ticketmaster executives for help on how to set up a lucrative resale business.
At a tradeshow kiosk set up at an international ticket brokers convention in Las Vegas, a Ticketmaster salesman was openly recruiting scalpers on a large scale, promoting TradeDesk and offering to help them manage and resell vast inventories of fan tickets – knowing full well that the scalpers were using fake accounts to acquire tickets.
At one point, the undercover CBC reporter said, “I want to know straight up if Ticketmaster is going to be monitoring our multiple accounts.”
“No,” the Ticketmaster representative said. “I have a gentleman who has over 200 Ticketmaster.com accounts.” The representative then noted that the company had “an auto-sync feature.”
“If you have 100 Ticketmaster.com accounts, you’re shopping there, buying inventory, the system will automatically sync them and move them over to build the (resale) inventory.”
“How many brokers are using multiple accounts?” CBC asked.
“I would say every single one of them is very close,” the representative said. “I can’t think of any of our customers who aren’t using multiple accounts.”
CBC News posed as the off-site ticket broker for the second time and arranged for an online product demo from a TradeDesk representative, who confirmed that Ticketmaster would turn a blind eye to the use of multiple fake accounts.
The CBC reporter asked, “If I’m using multiple Ticketmaster accounts to secure my tickets, will TradeDesk stop me from trying to sell them?”
“No,” the TradeDesk representative said. “The last thing we want to do – we’ve spent millions of dollars on this tool – so the last thing we want to do is, you know, drive brokers to where they can’t sell inventory with us.”
“So you’re not trying to track down people who are using multiple identities to get tickets?” CBC asked.
The TradeDesk salesman said, “No, not at all.”
Following CBC’s initial stories in 2018, Ticketmaster said it was considering cracking down on scalpers using fake accounts to circumvent ticket purchasing limits.
But in its letter to U.S. senators dated October 17, Live Nation/Ticketmaster says the company feared that, at the time, an action would “induce brokers to avoid Ticketmaster and post on other resale marketplaces.”
But now, facing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit from the US government and a possible court injunction that could force the company to close more of its reseller operations, Ticketmaster is promising changes.
