Ticketmaster accused of running own ticket touting programme

Ticketmaster has denied the claims.

The US arm of Ticketmaster has been accused of working with touts to make money from reselling tickets, an undercover investigation has claimed.

The ticketing giant is accused of working with touts by permitting fake accounts that enable them to bypass the multiple ticket limits.

When the tickets are then resold on Ticketmaster, the site takes a percentage from two individual sales.

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In July, journalists from CBC News and Toronto Star posed undercover at the Ticket Summit 2018 in Las Vegas to expose ticketing malpractices.

The reporters approached sales reps, who allegedly discussed how they hack buying limits by using multiple accounts and purchasing tickets in bulk before they are sold at a higher rate.

‘I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred accounts. It’s not something that we look at or report’, a sales rep from TradeDesk, Ticketmaster’s invite-only platform for selling tickets, reportedly said.

Another rep is alleged to have claimed that the practice was widespread because ‘you can’t make a living on just eight tickets’.

One rep also apparently alleged that the biggest tout had ‘grabbed around 5 million tickets a day’.

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Responding to the claims, a Ticketmaster spokesperson told CBC News: ‘We do not own the tickets sold on our platform nor do we have any control over ticket pricing – either in the initial sale or the resale.

‘In both cases, prices are set by the seller. We also do not determine when tickets are available for purchase or how they are allocated – those decisions are communicated to us by our client, the venue, after consultation with the event presenter.’

The spokesperson added: ‘As long as there is an imbalance between supply and demand in live event tickets, there will inevitably be a secondary market.’

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