It's actually illegal to sell tickets in the UK for more than face value, it's called touting. It still happens obviously, but you don't get sites like Ticketmaster selling the freaking things and tacitly encouraging it.
It's a big issue here.
Brokers in many cases have made tickets to big events like concerts into their personal cash cows. If a broker uses his/her system to get say 1000 tickets to a big time concert in a particular city, or gets tens of thousands for the tour, when each date sells out ticket prices jump to 10X and more. And I am sure they all keep in touch to make sure they have similar pricing to keep the prices high. It's an problem in large stadiums, in smaller venues like NBA arena it can be awful.
They have bots that buy up as many tickets as possible, often clogging up phone lines so normal real people can't get through. But usually hitting a website in huge numbers and buying tickets.
This is a significant part of the reason why you hear "the show sold out 4 hours after it was announced".
This is a quote from a Canadian site about a law they were working on up in the Great White North. And yes that says billions with a B. 5 billion bots blocked in North America, in one year, and that's just the ones that Ticketmaster blocked. Who knows how many Eventbrite and others blocked, if any. Obviously plenty enough are getting through to get tickets.
The ticket sales and events industry largely welcomed the ban, with Ticketmaster, a major ticket seller, saying it is in an "arms race" to develop new tools to combat the bots. In North America the company blocked five billion bots last year, an executive told the legislative committee considering the bill last month.
"There are only two types of buyers: There are fans and there are cheaters," Patti-Anne Tarlton from Ticketmaster Canada told the committee. "It's no secret that there's a vast network of cheaters, both domestic and globally, who are seeking to manipulate and game our system. The goal is for them to beat fans at on-sale and to cheat fans at resale."
Here is another quote from another article.
Take singer Ed Sheeran's recently posted concert scheduled for May at the Barclay's Center in Brooklyn, for example. Minutes after pre-sale tickets were made available for purchase to fan club and American Express members, more than 4,000 tickets were posted for resale on StubHub. Nearly a fifth of the tickets for AC/DC's show in Foxborough, Massachusetts, wound up on StubHub the day after they were posted.
I'd bet that 20-30% of NFL tickets are sold to brokers.
I hate it, and it's something that needs to be capped like they were talking about doing in Canada.
