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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.
Investigations are expensive. Forensic IT is even more expensive than regular investigations. If anything, they should make the companies allowing bots share the liability that way those companies will just outright bring an end to facilitating the bot purchases.
I am just trying to understand a little bit about this automated software.
I mean, we have been dealing with automated bots in the online world for a long time.
The general solution is stuff like CAPTCHAs.
Do these types of systems not exist in the ticket buying world?
It sounds like this is just legislation around lazy business practices.
By all means, feel free to point out my logical fallacy.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Require tickets to be tied to a person (first name, last name) when sold. Require that person to have valid ID on arrival. And prosecute anyone caught using fake ID's.
Airplane, boat, and train tickets require the ticket match the person. Any area subject to ticket scalping should require an ID too.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Just make sure that re-sale is not valid, anyone showing up at concert with a ticket need to prove that they purchased it through a valid channel by also presenting the credit card used for the purchase.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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 ?
When I went to AC/DC last September, I had to pick up the tickets at the venue, and show the credit card I'd used. When I went to Rush last September I had to bring along a print out of my receipt. The only concert last year that I could just bring my tickets to was King Crimson, but that was a small venue (3,000 seat) concert, with its own ticket sales so it wasn't through Ticketmaster.
But really, even the scalpers are a small part of the problem. It's Ticketmaster, with its "affiliates" (read wholly-owned subsidiaries) which buy up large amounts of tickets. Essentially, face value of the ticket is meaningless, as scalpers who can't get rid of their tickets before the big show find out. At AC/DC I saw scalpers trying to hawk tickets that I know were about $90 for $50 or $60. In other words, they were taking a big hit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Tickets get scalped because the price doesn't reflect demand. Instead of impossible to enforce regulations, why don't venues/artists instead change their pricing model?
Something like a reverse auction -- start the ticket process extremely high, like $10,000 per ticket and keep cutting the ticket price by small amounts based on sales volume. If volume remains fairly constant, then the price stays constant. The ticket price will then reflect what people are truly willing to pay, and ticket brokers won't be able to arbitrage the low face price versus the actual demand price.
Brokers can snap up all the $10,000 tickets they want on a day 1 of sales, but it will be both a huge capital outlay and they will not be able to sell many tickets for those prices plus their own profit premium.
You will still run the risk that as volume flags and the price falls, the tickets will hit a threshold where brokers believe they can still bulk purchase tickets, but I'd guess that the risk of being stuck with tickets they can't sell at a high price would be a negative incentive.
The bad thing would be -- well, tickets will be more expensive if you want to go, because you will be paying a higher price. But right now, the price is artificially low and acquiring tickets from the box office is more akin to a lottery than a marketplace.
Concert tickets are a luxury good, not a basic good to which citizens have some unalienable right.
They should thus be treated like any other luxury good - i.e. let the vendor raise prices until demand reduces to match supply.
If scalpers are able to resell tickets for "many times" their face value, then the original ticket vendor should have sold them at "many times" their face value. I'm sure the State would appreciate the extra tax revenue.
But doesn't this mean only rich folk get to go to concerts? Yes, but only rich folk get to drive Ferraris or buy Rolex watches, and no-one complains.
Or have a secret auction. Let everyone bid whatever amount they're prepared to pay, subject to a public minimum. The amount you bid is then deducted from your credit card, to discourage time-wasters When the auction closes, the winning x bids get allocated tickets, and the losing bids get refunded.
But doesn't this mean I might end up paying more than the dude in the seat beside me? Yes, which is why you should only bid what you're prepared to pay, i.e. what you believe the concert to be worth.
Scalpers won't be able to resell tickets in this system, since anyone prepared to pay an inflated price (higher than the scalper paid) would have had the opportunity to legitimately bid that higher amount during the auction, and in doing so would have been allocated a ticket ahead of the scalper.
They should be required to include all fees in the price of the ticket as well. It is outright fraud to advertise a ticket price that you cannot buy without fees tacked on. A mandatory fee is part of the cost of a ticket. A "convenience fee" is part of the cost of a ticket unless you can get it cheaper by being inconvenient.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
They should be required to include all fees in the price of the ticket as well. It is outright fraud to advertise a ticket price that you cannot buy without fees tacked on. A mandatory fee is part of the cost of a ticket. A "convenience fee" is part of the cost of a ticket unless you can get it cheaper by being inconvenient.
This right here. I recently went to a concert as a special treat and thought the ticket was advertised to be something like $45 for a seat it came out closer to $65 after Ticketmaster and the venue added all their outrageous fees, and if you're taking friends with you it adds up real fast.
At AC/DC I saw scalpers trying to hawk tickets that I know were about $90 for $50 or $60. In other words, they were taking a big hit.
Well, sure, they lose $40 per ticket. But they make up for it in volume.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Sounds like you used will call at the AC/DC and Rush concerts. If I have had tickets in hand I have never had to show an ID or a receipt. And no it's not Ticketmaster (they act as a box office agent, they don't actually buy the tickets and resell them), it starts with AMEX who gets up to 50% of the available tickets for their concierge program. Sometimes general ticket sales account for less then 10% of the overall ticket sales.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
So this bot driven scalping activity is illegal now in NY? How about they apply the same principal and block a similar practice by large Wall Street firms in our stock, commodities, futures, etc. markets? Bot driven trading has an identical effect in blocking out human participation, or making that participation less lucrative for human participants in the market. I guess if a large bank does it then it's ok then eh?
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.
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.
There's no need to do anything to prevent almost all resales other than to simply auction the tickets in the first place. When the highest bidder has bought the ticket there isn't much room left for increasing the price for a scalper's profit.
If the band is willing to sell the ticket for $30 so their fans can enjoy their show, then certainly the fan deserves that ticket for $30. If a bully was willing to punch the music fan in the gut and steal his ticket, by your simplistic logic, the fan, doesn't deserve the ticket. So let's extrapolate.
So the music fan gets gut punched and has his ticket stolen. He then gets up kills the gut puncher and can go to the show, and deserves to go because he wanted it more.
I had to do the same for AC/DC. It was for the first 15 rows. They said at the time of purchase, once you purchase you cannot change the info for pickup. I had to show ID+CC to pick it up. Allowed me to get row 9.