CBC reporter Dave Seglins signed up as "David Geoffrey," a small-time scalper from Toronto with a fictitious company, DGS Promotions.
With hidden cameras rolling, he mingled with some of the world's most successful scalpers, documenting candid accounts from players inside this notoriously secretive industry.
Casey Klein, Ticketmaster Resale director, held a session that was closed to the media called "We appreciate your partnership: More brokers are listing with Ticketmaster than ever before."
The audience heard that Ticketmaster has developed a professional reseller program and within the past year launched TradeDesk, a web-based inventory management system for scalpers. The company touts it as "The most powerful ticket sales tool. Ever."
TradeDesk allows scalpers to upload large quantities of tickets purchased from Ticketmaster's site and quickly list them again for resale. With the click of a button, scalpers can hike or drop prices on reams of tickets on Ticketmaster's site based on their assessment of fan demand.
Neither TradeDesk nor the professional reseller program are mentioned anywhere on Ticketmaster's website or in its corporate reports. To access the company's TradeDesk website, a person must first send in a registration request.
While Ticketmaster has a "buyer abuse" division that looks out for blatantly suspicious online activity, the presenter said the resale division doesn't police TradeDesk users.
"We don't share reports, we don't share names, we don't share account information with the primary site. Period," he said when asked whether he cares if scalpers use bots to buy their tickets.
CBC heard the same message from a different Ticketmaster employee during an online video conference demonstration of TradeDesk at an earlier stage of the undercover investigation back in March.
"We've spent millions of dollars on this tool. The last thing we'd want to do is get brokers caught up to where they can't sell inventory with us," he said when asked whether Ticketmaster will ban scalpers who thwart ticket-buying limits a direct violation of the company's terms of use.
"We're not trying to build a better mousetrap."
Disgusting. ---
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