Ticketmaster, the world’s largest online box office, is promising for the first time to crack down on industrial-scale scalpers to bar them from using hundreds — sometimes thousands — of fake Ticketmaster accounts to buy up and resell tickets for concerts, theatre and sporting events.
The move, announced in a letter to U.S. lawmakers late last week, comes after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit in September. The multimillion-dollar suit accuses Ticketmaster and its parent company, LiveNation, of “illegal ticket resale tactics” and “deceiving artists and consumers about price and ticket limits.”
The FTC lawsuit unearthed internal Ticketmaster documents showing, for example, that in 2018, five brokers controlled 6,345 Ticketmaster accounts and possessed 246,407 concert tickets to 2,594 events.
The big scalper eats the little scalpers.
Doesn’t Ticketmaster also own most of the resale websites?
Here’s one they just shut down, Tradedesk.
The FTC holds that Live Nation has enabled an exploitative aftermarket in oversights and consumer deception throughout its business model, profiting at every step of the resale process. “When reselling tickets brokers purchased from Ticketmaster,” the FTC’s complaint alleges, “Defendants can ‘triple dip’ on fees, collecting fees from: (1) brokers when they purchase the tickets on the primary market, (2) brokers, again, when Ticketmaster sells their tickets on Ticketmaster’s secondary market, and, finally, (3) consumers who purchase tickets from Ticketmaster on its secondary market.”
“We have investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong.”
Scalpers are their best customers…
So they are going to crackdown on checks notes themselves?
Yeah sure.
