As far as I know this is a problem that thankfully isn’t the biggest one in the EDM sphere, but when it comes to more mainstream concerts or sporting events most people can say they’ve been screwed over by a scalper and his bot one time or the other.
With the development of these kinds of bots, waiting an hour on your laptop to press that buy link at the exact second just doesn’t work as well as it used to. In one case, a bot bought over 1000 tickets to a U2 concert last year within the first minute. The scalper who snatched all those tickets probably made a tidy sum off of all those tickets by effectively changing “market price” to whatever he wanted, due to his huge supply, and reselling at a huge profit.
Thankfully for New Yorkers, the state legislature is moving to make the use of these bots a criminal offense, scalpers who are caught using a bot may face fines and even jail time. This new measure was brought about in part due to a three-year investigation by New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman.
Schneiderman didn’t just stop there with the bots however, “event insiders” who in some cases have reserved over 50% of the tickets for themselves, and ticketing agencies who add on those pesky “service fees” have also drawn his ire.
