Bots buying up tickets and reselling them at inflated prices is an increasing problem for popular concerts, shows, and sporting events. Fans try to buy tickets the moment they go on sale, only to find them sold out in seconds as bots scoop them up. This leaves many people unable to get tickets or having to pay exorbitant amounts on resale sites. So what can be done to stop bots from buying tickets?
Why do bots buy tickets?
Bots are automated programs that can buy tickets much faster than humans. They are programmed to target high-demand events and purchase the maximum number of tickets allowed. This lets the bot operators buy up huge inventories of tickets that they can then resell at a profit on secondary marketplaces. With markups of 200-1000% or more over face value, there is huge financial incentive for unscrupulous resellers to use bots. Bots also enable ticket scalping and resale to operate at a massive scale – it would be impossible for human ticket scalpers to buy so many tickets so quickly without bot technology.
Problems caused by ticket bots
The use of ticket bots harms consumers and the live event industry in several ways:
- It pushes ticket prices up – Fans end up having to pay inflated secondary market prices due to scarcity caused by bots grabbing so many tickets.
- It locks fans out – Tickets sell out instantly, preventing many fans from being able to buy at face value prices.
- It incentivizes mass scalping – Bots generate huge profits for scalpers, driving more scalping activity.
- It leads to fake scarcity – Bots make tickets seem more scarce than they really are, as large volumes are tied up by scalpers.
- It hurts event revenue – Events lose out on revenue when tickets are resold at higher prices, as opposed to being sold at the intended face value.
These factors combine to make the ticket buying experience frustrating for fans, while enabling unethical profit-taking. The rampant use of ticket bots has gone from being a nuisance to a major systemic problem in the live event business.
Anti-bot laws
In response to these issues, many states have enacted anti-bot legislation to prohibit or restrict the use of bots for buying event tickets. These laws impose civil penalties for using bots and make it illegal to circumvent security measures on ticket seller platforms. Two of the first states to enact laws were New York and California. New York’s 2016 law, the BOTS Act, made it illegal to use bots to buy over 5 tickets and to resell them within 5 days of purchase. Violators face fines of up to $500 per ticket.
However, enforcement has been challenging. Bot operators are sophisticated at disguising their activities and operate across state lines, while law enforcement often lacks the technical expertise to detect bot usage. Anti-bot laws are mainly enforced through private lawsuits, which has only occurred in a handful of cases.
Federal BOTS Act
To strengthen anti-bot efforts, the federal Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act was passed in 2016. This made the use of bots to purchase event tickets illegal nationwide. Violators can face civil penalties of up to $16,000 per ticket. The Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general have authority to enforce the BOTS Act. It has faced criticism for not going far enough, but does provide an additional disincentive for large-scale bot ticket scalping.
Technological countermeasures
Beyond laws, ticket sellers have deployed various technologies to try to detect and block bots from buying tickets:
- CAPTCHA – CAPTCHA tests require users to prove they are human by completing a visual puzzle or other check. This can help filter out bot traffic.
- Purchase limits – Restricting how many tickets a user can buy makes it harder for bots to grab huge volumes.
- IP blocking – Blocking traffic from known scalper IP addresses to deny access.
- Header enrichment – Analyzing HTTP header data to detect suspicious patterns indicative of bots.
- Scalper databases – Maintaining registries of known scalper addresses to block.
However, these have had limited success. Clever bot operators use constantly changing IP addresses, evade CAPTCHAs, and disguise their activity patterns to mimic human users. Bot detection has proven difficult, often flagging real fans as bots due to similarities in traffic spikes when tickets go on sale.
Ticketmaster’s anti-bot efforts
As the largest primary ticket seller, Ticketmaster has been at the forefront of anti-bot efforts. Beyond CAPTCHAs and purchase limits, it has developed more advanced bot countermeasures, including:
- Browser Cookies – Bots often don’t store cookies, allowing Ticketmaster to detect cookieless traffic.
- Page Analytics – Tracking page visit history and other factors to score visitor legitimacy.
- Queue-It – Virtual waiting room that restricts how many users can enter the ticket sales page.
According to Ticketmaster, these have reduced bot traffic significantly. However, bots continue evolving new ways to defeat bot detection, so it remains an ongoing battle.
How fans can avoid bots
For individual fans trying to buy tickets, here are some tips to avoid competing against bots:
- Buy pre-sale tickets – Many events offer pre-sales for members, subscribers, or using special codes. These typically have lighter bot traffic.
- Use official fan clubs – Artist and team fan clubs often get exclusive ticket allotments bots can’t access.
- Try lower-demand events – Avoid the most popular events that attract the heaviest bot activity.
- Use ticket seller apps – The apps often have better bot protection than mobile web.
- Get tickets in-person – Buying direct at the box office foils online bots.
Fans can also avoid the secondary market, or use ethical resale platforms like StubHub that restrict extreme price hikes. While bots may win some inventory, tickets often remain available through normal channels. Perseverance, flexibility and good timing helps real fans get tickets over the bots.
Long-term solutions
In the long run, experts advocate eliminating traditional single-sale events entirely. New technologies like dynamically priced auctions could foil bots by removing the profit motive of snapping up underpriced tickets. Strict licensing could restrict mass-scale reselling. And blockchain-based ticketing platforms offer more transparency and security.
However, fully transitioning to these new models faces challenges. Many events remain committed to fixed face-value pricing. And interest groups like ticket brokers lobby heavily against restrictions that undermine the lucrative resale market. Bots are also growing more advanced using AI and machine learning to mimic human behavior.
For meaningful reform, legislators and the live event industry need to cooperate on pragmatic standards that protect consumer rights while allowing reasonable resale activity. Comprehensive bot regulation combined with innovative technical measures can help restore more fairness and sanity to ticket buying.
Conclusion
Ticket buying bots remain a thorny problem harming the live event experience and industry. Anti-bot laws, improved bot detection, and fan awareness provide partial remedies. But eliminating the worst excesses of ticket scalping perpetuated by bots requires an ongoing commitment to laws, technology and ethical practices that put fans first.
