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MPs recommend ban on ticket buying bots

By | Published on Friday 25 November 2016

Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Ticket Abuse

MPs have recommended an amendment to the in-progress Digital Economy Bill banning the use of ‘bots’ to buy up large amounts of tickets on primary ticketing sites in order to sell them on the secondary market.

This and other concerns about the ticketing market are raised in a new letter from the Chair of the Culture, Media And Sport Select Committee, Damian Collins MP, to Culture Secretary Karen Bradley. It follows that recent evidence gathering hearing in Parliament into the use of bots, which MPs said highlighted “much more far-ranging and disturbing factors in the market”.

In a statement, Collins says: “The answers we got from witnesses representing the ticket sellers and resellers went from complacent to evasive, and their failure to provide the most basic assurances about what they’re doing to tackle known large scale touts and fraudsters operating on their own sites – we had an example on screen in front of a Member in the session – have led us to believe there may be much bigger problems in this market than we originally thought”.

He continues: “We are writing to the Secretary of State to ask her to begin to look more closely at this issue but also as a first step that there seems to be a lot of consensus on amending the Digital Economy Bill to ban the technology that harvests tickets on a large scale before genuine fans ever get a look in”.

“The Competition And Markets Authority is due to report on whether ticket companies are complying with consumer law, and given their performance at our evidence session we await this with interest”, he notes. “In the meantime, we heard strong evidence indicating there is a significant level of under-reporting of income by known touts trading on secondary sites and we believe this is another aspect of this that warrants investigation, by HMRC”.

Nigel Adams MP had already proposed a bot-ban be added to the DEB, though withdrew that amendment after the government said it wanted to see if such technology already breaks the Computer Misuse Act. But Collins’ letter shows that, either way, there is now support for a specific bot-ban in the new legislation. Read Collins’ full letter here.



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