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Ticket brokers pay over $2.7 million in fines in New York over tout bots

By | Published on Thursday 28 April 2016

Ticket touts

Six ticket brokers in the US will together pay $2.76 million in fines as part of a settlement with the New York Attorney General for violating ticket selling laws in the state.

The move is seen as the start of a wider crackdown against good old ticket touting in New York State, following the previously reported publication earlier this year of the report ‘Why Can’t New Yorkers Get Tickets?’, commissioned by the state’s AG Eric T Schneiderman.

When publishing the report in January, Schneiderman said: “Ticketing is a fixed game. My office will continue to crackdown on those who break our laws, prey on ordinary consumers and deny New Yorkers affordable access to the concerts and sporting events they love”.

The six ticket brokers targeted by Schneiderman were TicketToad.com, Avery Tickets, Charm City Entertainment, All Events, Just In Time Tickets and A2Z Tix. All six were accused of selling tickets in New York State without the required licence, while all but Charm City also used so called bots in order to hoover up tickets from primary sites in order to resell them on the secondary market.

The latter point is most important with regard to the wider debate around secondary ticketing. Even some of the secondary ticketing sites have been critical of the bots employed by some touts, which are basically software that can spot when tickets are put on sale via primary sites, and then automatically buy hundreds of tickets for in-demand shows.

They do this by employing multiple logins, email addresses and credit cards, so to circumvent any restrictions on how many tickets any one customer can buy. It’s widely believed that it’s the bots that ensure in-demand events often sell out before most fans have even managed to log on to the primary ticketing site.

As part of the settlement the six ticket brokers have reached with Schneiderman, aside from paying fines of between $100,000 and $1,125,000, the companies have all committed to stop selling tickets in New York without licence, and to stop using bots to access tickets.

It’s thought that Schneiderman’s office could instigate other crackdowns against ticket touts in the coming months, with the AG saying earlier this week: “Our office will continue to enforce New York’s ticket laws by investigating ticket brokers who are breaking our laws, and making them pay for their illegal acts”.

Meanwhile, others are now wondering whether Schneiderman’s actions could have an impact beyond New York. The regulations he is enforcing mainly sit in state rather than federal law, but other states may follow his lead, both in introducing new regulations and enforcing them.

The increasingly proactive anti-tout campaigners in the UK will no doubt be looking to see if the New York Attorney General’s tactics could be employed over here to stop the flood of tickets that end up being sold at hiked up prices on the touting sites.



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