'A public relations nightmare': Ticketmaster recruits pros for secret scalper program
Box-office giant Ticketmaster is recruiting professional scalpers who cheat its own system to expand its resale business and squeeze more money out of fans, a CBC News/Toronto Star investigation reveals.
In July, the news outlets sent a pair of reporters undercover to Ticket Summit 2018, a ticketing and live entertainment convention at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Posing as scalpers and equipped with hidden cameras, the journalists were pitched on Ticketmaster's professional reseller program.
Company representatives told them Ticketmaster's resale division turns a blind eye to scalpers who use ticket-buying bots and fake identities to snatch up tickets and then resell them on the site for inflated prices. Those pricey resale tickets include extra fees for Ticketmaster.
"I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred accounts," one sales representative said. "It's not something that we look at or report."
CBC shared its findings with Alan Cross, a veteran music journalist and host of the radio program The Ongoing History of New Music, who suspects the ticket-buying public will be far from impressed: "This is going to be a public relations nightmare."
He said there have been "whispers of this in the ticket-selling community, but it's never been outlined quite like this before."
"It does seem a bit stinky, doesn't it?"
By partnering with scalpers, Ticketmaster has done an about-face from its position of less than a decade ago when then-CEO Irving Azoff told U.S. legislators: "I believe that scalping and resales should be illegal."
Two floors above the slot machines and blackjack tables at Caesars, Ticketmaster was one of dozens of vendors and speakers at the convention, which bills itself as a "one-of-a-kind networking event" for industry leaders and small businesses alike.
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