Having trouble buying tickets? Here’s why

One minute. That’s all it took one software program to snap up 1,012 tickets to a U2 show at Madison Square Garden last year, New York’s attorney general says in a report unearthing abuse in the ticketing industry.

Eric Schneiderman says many brokers illegally use special software to buy tickets to concerts and sporting events in bulk on sites like Ticketmaster. Many other tickets are held by industry insiders such as venue operators, artists or promoters, or reserved for “pre-sale” to particular groups, including holders of certain credit cards.

N.Y. attorney general slams software that lets brokers illegally score hundreds of event tickets with a single click

Less than half of tickets are released for sale to the public, the report says. The attorney general’s investigation of the industry was prompted by regular consumer complaints.

“Ticketing, to put it bluntly, is a fixed game,” the report says.

Investigators found that third-party brokers resell tickets on sites like StubHub and TicketsNow at average margins of 49 per cent above face value and sometimes more than 10 times the price. Some brokers use illegal specialty software, called “ticket bots,” to quickly purchase as many desirable tickets as possible for resale at significant markups, they said.

TicketBots.net, a website mentioned in Schneiderman’s report, advertises software that trawls ticketvendor websites and lets users buy hundreds of tickets with a single mouse click. A StubHub “spinner bot” sells for $990 (U.S.).

“I’ve never used them — never have, never will — but it’s definitely a pretty unfair advantage,” said Chris Shea, owner of Bay Street Ticket Services in Toronto.

When he got into the business 10 years ago, it was about cosying up to season-ticket holders and making deals that way, he said. But the times appear to be changing.

“One of the reasons Blue Jays tickets were so expensive at playoff time was because American brokers came in and bought all the inventory using bots,” he said.

The National Association of Ticket Brokers’ code of ethics prohibits its members in the U.S. and Canada from using “automated devices/programs to purchase tickets.”

The organization has never received a complaint about the use of bots nor have any of its brokers been sanctioned for that reason, the association’s executive director, Gary Adler, told the Star.

“The perception that all these tickets are out there and brokers are scooping them up with bots is extremely inaccurate,” he said.

The New York attorney general’s report, however, urges ticket vendors to “address the bot epidemic.”

Ticketmaster says it co-operated with the attorney general’s office and “looks forward to continuing to work with the attorney general to ensure that artists can get tickets into the hands of their fans,” the Los Angelesbased company said in a statement.

A spokesperson for StubHub said: “Consumers should be protected from unfair and deceptive practices that make it harder for fans to buy and use event tickets in an open market.”

Ticketmaster and others try to trip up bots by using Captchas, which ask users to demonstrate that they are human by deciphering squiggly lines or correctly identifying trees in a series of pictures, for example.

Ticket bots have been around for years and many have evolved to bypass these tests through improved “optical character recognition” and other means, said Michael Shoukry of the cyber security firm FireEye.

Sites like Ticketmaster can detect bots by monitoring how long it takes visitors to their page to enter the credit card number, an action that may take a human a couple of seconds but only an instant for a bot.

But online ticket vendors and resellers won’t be able to thwart bots completely, he said. “Someone is always going to be smarter than us.”

The New York attorney general also found that venues and sellers like Ticketmaster regularly tacked on fees that added more than 21per cent to the face value. They found that on average, 16 per cent of tickets are saved for various industry insiders such as venue employees, artists and promoters, while 38 per cent are reserved for presales to certain groups, like holders of a specific credit card.