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New York Criminalizes the Use Of Ticket-Buying Bots (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader writes: If you failed to get tickets for your favorite band, even though your finger was poised on the "buy" link the instant they went on sale, don't worry -- you never stood a chance. They were probably snapped up by bots that, in one case, bought 1,012 Madison Square Garden U2 tickets in less than a minute. The state of New York has declared that scalpers who use them could get fines and even jail time. "New Yorkers have been dealing with this frustrating ticket buying experience for too long," says state assembly member Marcos Crespie. Using such bots was illegal before, but only brought civil, not criminal sanctions. However, a three-year investigation by NY attorney general Eric. T. Schneiderman found that the practice was so widespread that the state had to take harsher measures. Ticketing outlets and credit card companies revealed that bots scoop up the best seats in seconds, which scalpers then resell at prices many times over face value. Scalpers who exploit such software could now face criminal, class A misdemeanor charges.
The big two, Live Nation and TicketMaster do have captchas, and they give them several times throughout the buying process. However, it is very easy to fake many of these systems. In addition, at least live nation now offers resale tickets on their own website. That means they are double dipping, the original sale+fees, plus commission+fees on resale tix. The have no incentive to stop this process.
IMHO, that is where the problem lies, not the scalpers. The system as it is is broken, but it is allowed to be broken by the companies that sell tickets as the market operates in their favor.
The only real fix I see to this is to associate a CC or ID with the ticket purchase and require it to be presented with the ticket for admission. This creates a whole host of other issues, such as inability to resale or gift easily, plus longer, slower lines at venues.
Silence is a state of mime.
This is bad for an individual to do but OK for the 2nd hand reselling companies that snap up 100's of prime seats and sell them online for ridiculous amounts. Reselling is OK if you don't do it on the street in front of the venue, where it is considered scalping in many places. I've been to shows where the first 3 or 4 rows were corporate owned seats that rarely fill up, and heard the performers complain about the empty seats and call for the fans to fill them up, stating it gives them energy to have true fans up close vs. wine sipping corporate douche bags sitting on their hands.
https://seatgeek.com/tba/artic....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Says some one who has never bought tickets months in advance. Sometimes life happens.
Granted this law will do nothing with the biggest offender. Credit card pre-sales. You know, those credit card rewards that guarantee you tickets before anyone else can get them. Or the fact bands themselves may scalp their own tickets.
Your likely hood of getting tickets from the box office are basically nil for a popular show.
Take the Jan 18 Bieber show. Out of 14000 seats, just over 1000 were available for general sale.
6000 went to Amex presales
3000 to Fan Club members
2600 to promotions, guest lists and un-sell-able seats (due to visual obstruction)
900 to other VIP programs
and 500 were scalped by the biebs himself
1001 were sold to the general public.
So yeah, lets blame the scalpers.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The rich don't pay scalper prices. They get them from AMEX, who gets far more tickets then anyone else, far far more then the scalpers. No it's the poor and the middle class who get stuck paying scalper prices.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Considering HFT does nothing for the company who's stocks are being traded, I see no reason it shouldn't be.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Yes - the companies selling the tickets need to have a financial stake in stopping the bots. Without a financial motive, the ticket sellers will continue to have crappy code. Currently, the incentives are all wrong. The ticket sellers sell tickets quickly and get all their fees under the current system. The bulk scalpers are good business for them, and they have no reason to stop them.
If anything, the ticket sellers should be required to have a system that prevents bulk scalping, with penalties for failing to do this.
Politicians complicate life - logic is sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.
Only if you presume that a teleporter reconstructs you out of subatomic material available at the destination. If instead, the your quantum wave function were to be directly manipulated so that the probability of the collection of particles that represents you is reduced at one location while being increased at another location (subject only to uncertainty principles that are unavoidable at quantum levels), then you are not killed at your old location at all, as the probability of you being at the original location drops to zero (while the probability of you being somewhere else is 1 minus that probability), you would quite literally cease to be there in any way, and would simultaneously materialize at your destination. The "you" at the destination is not a copy of you, any more than a particle that has experienced quantum tunnelling is a copy of what it was before it tunnelled. Of course, the practical limitation on distance that this is liable to ever be achieved over is small enough that it would probably always be more efficient to simply walk.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If you really want to slow down wholesale scalpers, tie at least 1 ticket in each purchase to a real person and don't allow any one person to buy more than 10 tickets per purchase without registering as a "group purchase."
The other tickets can have names assigned to them or not at the time of purchase as the buyer sees fit. The original purchaser can assign names to the unnamed tickets any time up to the event or they can be left un-assigned as "bearer tickets."
However:
* "Unnamed/bearer" tickets are not valid until at least one "named" ticket has entered the event.
* Once a name is assigned to a ticket, the name can be only be changed with a time-consuming phone call, paper-mail, or in-person visit that would include some form of identity verification. The venue can (and probably will) limit the number of such changes to a few dozen per year per person to curb abuse.
In exchange for making it somewhat harder for "Average Joe" ticket-buyers to re-sell their tickets, venues and authorized ticketing agents like Ticketmaster would promise to buy back tickets for a full refund for the ticket price and the convenience charge up to, say, a week before the event and refund the full price of the ticket up to a day before the event, subject to limits to prevent abuse.
Tickets sold to registered groups would come under different rules.
This system is NOT designed to stop or even put much of a road-block in the way of small-time scalpers or people who resell their season tickets. It's designed to increase the cost of doing business for organizations who buy and resell hundreds or thousands of tickets per year and who are determined to "beat the system" by
* Forcing them to have lots of different "buyers" with lots of different credit card numbers so their high activity won't be flagged
* Forcing them to assign a name to at least one out of every 10 tickets
* Forcing them to make sure at least 1 of every 10 tickets is represented by a warm body who shows up at the event before the other 9 people in that "ticket group" do
This will make large-scale scalping non-cost-effective for events where the secondary-price of the ticket isn't a whole lot more than the face value of the ticket. Since the non-mass-ticket-buying public can get a full refund, they won't have an incentive to sell tickets to scalpers at anything less than face value.
Wholesale ticket-buying by scalpers will still be an issue for high-demand events. For those events, either a ticket lottery with every ticket having a name on it and a full refund may be the only way to ensure the general public can get tickets at reasonable prices. Alternatively, a dutch auction wouldn't save ticket-buyers any money but at least the ticket revenue would go back to the venue and those running the event rather than to scalpers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Limit the number of tickets you can buy per transaction.
If you can purchase thousands of tickets on one captcha, it defeats the purpose of the captcha.
Limit it to a max of 5 tickets per transaction, with each transaction requiring a new captcha, and a restriction on purchasing more than 20 tickets per credit card.
That would make a big dent.
If anyone could make a consistent profit by speculative buying of tickets for resale, obviously the event operator would be first to adjust ticket prices to match the established new market. This is really about a graft-ridden city making a perfectly normal market activity, reselling tickets people can't use, illegal by giving it an ugly name like 'scalping'.
Meanwhile here in Arizona, it's legal to resell any event or game ticket, right up to the Super Bowl. Reselling is done openly outside stadiums to accommodate fans who had a friend blow into town unexpectedly and want to see their team. Sharpies buying up all the tickets and cornering the market just doesn't happen.