Hit Shows Try to Foil High-Tech Scalpers

LONDON — “Hamilton” and the new “Harry Potter” play are the hottest theatrical shows of the moment, with “Hamilton” outgrossing everything else on Broadway, and Harry, Hermione and Ron drawing hordes of muggles to London’s West End.

But success has a side effect: Both shows have fallen prey to high-tech scalpers who harvest large quantities of seats and resell them at exorbitant markups. “Hamilton” has been hit particularly hard: When it first opened on Broadway, nearly 80 percent of seats were purchased by automated ticket bots, and for the show’s creator Lin-Manuel Miranda’s final performance in the title role of Alexander Hamilton, resellers were seeking $10,900 a seat.

Now, as “Hamilton” prepares to open in London this fall and “Harry Potter” plans to open on Broadway next year, the producers of both shows are aggressively trying to contain scalping. The producers of “Hamilton” are trying an unusual approach for theater — paperless ticketing — while the producers of “Harry Potter” are refusing to accept resold tickets. And in the United States and Britain, policy makers are tackling the issue anew, concerned about the effect of industrialized scalping on consumers and artists.

“I’ve been in the business 50 years, and I’ve lived through lots of scalping,” said Cameron Mackintosh, producer of “Cats,” “Les Misérables,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Miss Saigon.” “It’s just got far, far more sophisticated, because of automation’s creeping stranglehold on human beings.”

Mr. Mackintosh is also an owner of major theaters in the West End, including Victoria Palace, where “Hamilton” will begin performances in November. For the tickets that just went on sale — and immediately sold out — the show is trying paperless ticketing.

Picture this: Instead of receiving a ticket from the box office or a facsimile printed at home, you just get an email confirming your purchase. Then, on the day of the show, you have to bring the same credit card you used for the purchase — as well as the email confirmation and a photo ID — and run the credit card through a scanner to get in. The theory is that requiring the same credit card should complicate efforts by would-be resellers.

There are downsides: It makes it harder to purchase tickets as gifts, and there is a risk of congestion or confusion at the theater doors. And the method is not fail-safe. On the day “Hamilton” tickets went on sale in London, with a face value of up to $200, tickets were already being promoted for resale at up to $6,000. Their validity was unknown, and the show has vowed to cancel resold tickets.

For now, paperless ticketing does not appear to be an option in New York, which restricts such sales. There, “Hamilton” has tried a different approach: reducing the effect of resellers by canceling suspect purchases, and, more recently, by raising prices at the box office to more closely reflect the tickets’ perceived market value.

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a critically acclaimed sequel to J. K. Rowling’s books, is trying a similar, labor-intensive approach in London. The producers have hired a group of workers who are combing through sales records and broker sites, looking for evidence of unauthorized bulk buying — often via bots, which are computer programs used by scalpers — as well as for tickets offered on resale websites. The show’s producers say they have stopped about 2,500 online sales and have refused to accept tickets from

Bots snap tickets up, and audiences pay the exorbitant price.

about 150 patrons at the door — a tiny fraction of tickets sold to date.

The secondary ticketing market has long been a significant factor for major concerts and sports events. Live Nation Entertainment, the company that owns Ticketmaster, has estimated it at $8 billion a year. And the business is increasingly global, making any one country’s laws difficult to enforce.

The issue affects other shows beyond “Hamilton” and “Harry Potter.” New York Theater Workshop, a nonprofit that has just 200 seats and is perhaps best known as the birthplace of “Rent,” has emerged as a test case because it has recently had two shows with strong crossover appeal: “Lazarus,” featuring songs by David Bowie, and “Othello,” starring Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo.

The theater tried to limit reselling by requiring ticket buyers to present the same credit card used for the purchase at the box office.

“The lesson we learned is that it is possible to limit it and to frustrate their attempts,” said Jeremy Blocker, the theater’s managing director, “but not to completely eliminate it.”