A report by CBC News has alleged that Ticketmaster is recruiting professional scalpers who cheat its own system to help the company squeeze more money out of fans.
The allegations centre around an undercover investigation which saw a pair of reporters attend Las Vegas ticketing convention Ticket Summit 2018 in July. The journalists posed as professional scalpers and were recruited onto Ticketmaster’s professional reseller programme.
From there representatives of Ticketmaster told them that the company’s resale arm turns a blind eye to scalpers who use ticket-buying bots and fake identities to buy up in-demand tickets and resell them on the site for inflated prices. Those inflated resale tickets are a benefit to Ticketmaster as they provide them with more revenue via extra fees.
"I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred accounts," one sales representative is reported as having said in a recording obtained by CBC. The sales representative adds: "It’s not something that we look at or report."
CBC also reports that Ticketmaster Resale Director Casey Klein held a session which was closed to the media in which he unveiled TradeDesk, a web-based inventory management system developed by Ticketmaster. It is claimed that the system allows touts to quickly list large quantities of tickets purchased through the site for resale. The software is not listed anywhere on Ticketmaster’s website.
When contacted for an interview by CBC, Ticketmaster declined, and instead issued a statement saying: "As long as there is an imbalance between supply and demand in live event tickets, there will inevitably be a secondary market. As the world’s leading ticketing platform, representing thousands of teams, artists and venues, we believe it is our job to offer a marketplace that provides a safe and fair place for fans to shop, buy and sell tickets in both the primary and secondary markets."
