Report: Ticketmaster Works with Scalpers Using ‘Hundreds of Accounts’ to Drive Up Ticket Prices

Ticketmaster works with ticket scalpers who quickly buy up tickets using hundreds of accounts and then sell them for inflated prices, according to an investigative report.

The Toronto Star and the CBC reported that Ticketmaster happily works with ticket scalpers because it then makes more money from extra resale fees through its resale platform TradeDesk, where people can trade tickets for sold out events.

“I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred accounts,” claimed a Ticketmaster representative to an undercover reporter. “It’s not something that we look at or report.”

A TradeDesk sales executive also described the partnership between Ticketmaster and TradeDesk as “church and state.”

“We don’t spend any time looking at your Ticketmaster.com account. I don’t care what you buy. It doesn’t matter to me,” the executive expressed to the Toronto Star. “There’s total separation between Ticketmaster and our division. It’s church and state… We don’t monitor that at all.”

“We don’t share reports, we don’t share names, we don’t share account information with the primary site. Period,” he continued.

Ticketmaster reportedly denied the claims.

In May, Ticketmaster announced a partnership with a facial recognition company which would allow event attendees to use their face as their ticket.

Update — A Ticketmaster spokesperson provided Breitbart News with the following statement:

“It is categorically untrue that Ticketmaster has any program in place to enable resellers to acquire large volumes of tickets at the expense of consumers.

Ticketmaster’s Seller Code of Conduct specifically prohibits resellers from purchasing tickets that exceed the posted ticket limit for an event. In addition, our policy also prohibits the creation of fictitious user accounts for the purpose of circumventing ticket limit detection in order to amass tickets intended for resale.

A recent CBC story found that an employee of Ticketmaster’s resale division acknowledged being aware of some resellers having as many as 200 TradeDesk accounts for this purpose (TradeDesk is Ticketmaster’s professional reseller product that allows resellers to validate and distribute tickets to multiple marketplaces). We do not condone the statements made by the employee as the conduct described clearly violates our terms of service.

The company had already begun an internal review of our professional reseller accounts and employee practices to ensure that our policies are being upheld by all stakeholders. Moving forward we will be putting additional measures in place to proactively monitor for this type of inappropriate activity.”