Despite years of advancements in digital ticketing, ticket touting continues to undermine the matchday experience and damages fan trust. Various ticket protection measures have been introduced, but scalpers consistently find ways to bypass them. This leads to inflated prices for fans and lost revenue for clubs and ticketing companies.
Many ticketing companies and event organizers wrongly believe their job is done once tickets are sold. But that’s not the case. Letting touts and secondary resellers buy tickets in bulk and sell them for multiples of the original price means lost income. If all ticket sales, including resales, happened on the official platform, the extra revenue would stay in the hands of those who earned it and not those who exploited the system.
So, how does ticket touting happen?
Ticket touts automate ticket purchases to beat fans in speed
The essence of industry-scale ticket touting lies in speed and scale. Touts rely on advanced bots and automation tools to auto-fill forms and buy tickets faster than any human possibly could. These systems are designed to mimic legitimate user behavior, bypass security checks, and complete purchases in seconds. Once tickets are secured, they’re listed on secondary marketplaces. Here is a list of different bots used for ticket touting.
- Account creation bots: Create fake accounts to bypass ticket purchase limits, giving fraudsters access to an unfair share of the supply.
- Account takeover bots: Target existing accounts, using stolen credentials or brute-force methods to hijack legitimate user profiles for ticket purchases.
- Expediting bots: Have unmatched speed and reach the checkout page in seconds. A single bot can manage multiple windows, securing a large number of tickets before fans can even finish typing their names.
- Scraping bots: Scan websites for specific tickets. Once found, they deploy expediting bots to reserve and scalping bots to buy, locking out genuine fans.
- Spinning bots: Add tickets to carts and hold them to create artificial scarcity. Fans, desperate to attend events, turn to secondary marketplaces and pay inflated prices. Scalpers then purchase the tickets only after the resale, securing massive profits.
List of Methods Ticket Touts Use to Outsmart Ticketing Sellers
Unfortunately, ticket touts are ahead of ticketing companies in terms of technology development. They invest millions in the latest ticket touting tools, constantly staying one step ahead of traditional protections. As a result, event organizers are left frustrated and helpless, fighting an uphill battle with outdated solutions.
Let’s look at it more closely.
1. Passwords unlocking presale drops
Ticketing companies like Ticketmaster offer programs such as Verified Fan to give loyal fans access to pre-sale tickets. Other platforms use confidential passwords to protect pre-sale access. However, tools like the Flare plugin enable ticket touts to bypass these protections, allowing them to secure premium tickets at lower prices.
2. Proxy servers to constantly reroute IP addresses
BartProxies offers solutions that reroute scalpers’ IP addresses to make it appear as if they’re operating from multiple locations, avoiding bans by primary ticket sellers.
3. Circumventing blocking of credit cards
Providers like Taekus offer touts virtual credit card services that allow the scalpers to virtually create a new credit card and fake address for each purchase. So blocking credit cards becomes useless.
4. Overcoming 2FA and Re-Captcha
Resellers’ bots have learned to solve common Re-Captcha tasks like selecting images or puzzles, making this widely used security measure ineffective. Both 2FA and Re-Captcha can be solved using Netnut.
5. Reverse-engineering dynamic QR codes
Dynamic QR codes often appear to be the most promising solution to stop ticket touting. But both AXS and Ticketmaster had their systems reverse-engineered. This allowed touts to duplicate official tickets, modify their details, and resell them on secondary platforms. These fake tickets scanned as valid at the gate, causing overcrowding, operational issues, and direct financial losses for event organizers.
6. Deferred delivery of resold tickets while waiting for official release
Some clubs and ticketing providers try to block ticket touting by delaying when tickets appear in official apps. The idea is that if touts can’t access the tickets early, they won’t be able to resell them in time. But platforms like Viagogo are used to waiting. They often deliver tickets to buyers at the very last moment, just before kick-off if needed. This tactic makes deferred delivery ineffective, while also adding uncertainty for genuine fans.
How to Stop Ticket Touting and Retain 100% of Ticket Sales on Primary Platforms?
The most effective solution to ticket touting is identity verification. Every ticket buyer must verify their identity by capturing their ID document and a selfie. The system then checks if the document is genuine and whether the person in the selfie matches the one on the ID. This step stops fraud attempts early in the process. Since bots have no face or valid ID, they can’t complete the verification and are blocked from purchasing tickets.
But identity checks alone are not enough. As long as tickets exist in the form of QR codes or barcodes, they remain transferable without control. These tokens can easily be shared or sold, allowing touts to bypass identity checks and move tickets without the organizer’s control. This is where the real shift needs to happen.
It’s important to realize that the ticket itself is the root cause of ticket touting. Eliminate the ticket and you will eliminate ticket touting.
The goal is to link every ticket to a verified identity, such as the buyer’s face. While identity checks prevent bots from buying tickets, touts can still hire real people to create accounts and purchase tickets on their behalf. However, they don’t have the software to swap the face linked to a ticket. Without the ability to change the identity associated with the ticket, they cannot resell it on their platform.
This forces scalpers to resell only on the official platform, where ticket transfers are restricted to verified accounts. Organizers can access behavioral data, flag accounts that consistently buy and resell tickets, and ban them. Without a large pool of verified individuals, touts will eventually be unable to scale their operations and will be shut out.
How Biometric Ticketing Helps Event Organizers Increase Revenue?
Once you eliminate ticket touting and control 100% of ticket sales, the benefits become clear. First, you can increase prices for high-demand events. Instead of touts making 10x the original ticket price, you can partially raise prices yourself or use dynamic pricing to maximize your revenue.
Second, by managing the resale platform, you can earn a percentage from every resale. To ensure fairness, you can set a cap on the resale price, but it still generates additional revenue that you currently miss out on.
Overall, you boost revenue from both primary ticket sales and secondary resales.
Additionally, you gain access to accurate, encrypted, and pseudonymized fan data. This data can be used to send targeted offers and personalize fan experiences, leading to even more opportunities for monetization and further revenue growth. To learn more about leveraging fan data, check out this article.
