The South Korean government has referred fifteen ticket touts to the police over suspicions they sourced the tickets they were touting through illegal means.
The action comes ahead of the introduction of tougher ticket touting regulations in South Korea which lawmakers voted through back in January and which go into effect on 28 Aug.
As in many other countries, current anti-touting rules in South Korea make it illegal to use bots to hoover up large quantities of tickets to then resell on touting platforms. It’s assumed the fifteen touts reported to the police use bots, in part because of the high numbers of tickets they were selling.
According to the Seoul Economic Daily, the country’s Ministry Of Culture, Sports And Tourism says its investigators monitored data from major ticket resale platforms, “examining sales accounts, the number of sales, the scale of sales for the same event, sales amounts and ticketing source information”.
Some sellers were found to have “a total of 100 sales transactions” per event and “estimated sales amounts exceeding 5 million won”, which is about £2500.
A spokesperson for the ministry says, “We view this pattern of bulk sales as exceeding the scope of ordinary individual transfers or normal ticket booking, and in cases where a large number of tickets for the same event were sold, it is difficult to rule out the possibility that the seller purchased the tickets through illegal methods such as automated programs”.
Under the new ticket touting rules due to go into force this summer the authorities won’t have to show that a tout employed a sneaky bot to access tickets to sell.
According to The Korea Herald, under the revised laws, “any attempt to bypass or disrupt fair ticket purchasing processes for resale purposes, or to repeatedly sell tickets at prices exceeding face value for profit, will be illegal”.