Scalpers use bots and CAPTCHA-bypassing software to buy up concert tickets before fans can. Songkick blocked over 50,000 suspected scalper sales, but the secondary resale market keeps growing as ticketing sites struggle to stop automated purchases.
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You're watching Fox 5 News at 5. All right, as if you couldn't love her anymore, Adele is now standing up against scalpers.
Matt King shows us how the singer is trying to stop greedy ticket resellers from gouging her fans.
On Thursday, Adele fans felt like they must have refreshed their browser windows a thousand times and most still failed to buy tickets tickets to see Adele on her 25 Tour.
You knew it was going to sell out and it was going to be a hot item for scalpers.
John Blistein wrote a story for RollingStone.com summarizing how Adele planned to stop scalpers from hoarding tickets to future shows.
I mean, Ticketmaster is now in the resale business itself, so its incentive to like kind of stop it has dropped.
After the 750,000 tickets to Adele's 50 US shows disappeared in a couple hours, and immediately reappeared on the secondary market, Adele partnered with the company Songkick to distribute tickets for her European tour Friday. Songkick sells tickets through artists' websites or fan sites, forcing buyers to register and supposedly reducing purchases by scalpers. For the 25 Tour, the company says it blocked more than 50,000 sales to suspected scalpers.
There are a number of ways scalpers get all the tickets.
A security expert with Hotspot Shield, Robert Siciliano, says scalpers employ lots of buyers using lots of computers to overwhelm ticket sellers. They also cheat.
The scalpers use software programs to beat the ticket companies that basically fill in the orders at, you know, breakneck speed. And they also fill in the CAPTCHA, you know, like the, the, the code that you have to put in at the end.
Those bots gobbling up all our tickets prevent the average individual consumer from purchasing a seat at face value.
And I had to keep refreshing just to like see if something else was going to come up. Eventually something came up and I was stoked, and then I go to pay and at the end I get a 503 gateway error.
Elton John's also complained about scalpers stealing all tickets to his shows and he says that he would prefer empty seats at his shows instead of attendees who were forced to buy scalped tickets. Now right now that would require people to simply stop buying tickets from all secondary vendors, which seems very unlikely. Steve Derek.
I know it's hard to get sort of a lame audience if they can afford $500 tickets, I hear what Elton's saying. Alright, thank you, Mac.
