Lindsay Maizland

Published on 38 TEGNA websites. Video shot and edited by me. Summer 2018.

Sold out. Music fans trying to score tickets to concerts online are seeing those dreaded words more and more. But even worse is seeing those tickets marked up to three times the price on resale websites.

Frustrated fans can blame scalpers who use ticket bots – sophisticated computer programs that buy up hundreds of tickets seconds after they go on sale. And despite a new law that makes bots illegal, not much has changed.

Just last month, two music lovers hoped to get tickets to see their favorite bands.

Farrah Asgari-Majd got in line at 4:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Even though she was cold and soaked by rain, the thought of seeing one of her favorite bands, Nine Inch Nails, kept her smiling. After waiting for nearly six hours, she finally had tickets to great seats.

“I’ve got gold. Like literal gold,” she said.

A week earlier, another fan tried to get tickets to a different concert. Valerya Calleros Tagle jumped online minutes before 10 a.m. on a Friday. But by 10:01 a.m., all the tickets were gone.

Only one ended up with tickets, and bots are to blame.

It seems old school, but when fans stand in line, they only compete with other fans who show up. But online, it’s more complicated. Eager concert-goers not only have to beat other fans, but they also have to beat the bots.

Professional scalpers use bots to buy tons of tickets as soon as they go on sale. Many tickets then become available at marked-up prices on resale websites like StubHub. Fans either end up empty-handed or hand over more cash.

Using ticket bots is a lucrative business. One scalper purchased 30,000 tickets to Broadway hit “Hamilton” over 20 months in 2015 and 2016. The same scalping business bought 1,012 tickets to a U2 concert in New York City less than a minute after they went on sale in 2014. Those tickets were sold at markups averaging 49 percent. In another attack, one bot got 520 tickets within three minutes to an August 2013 Beyoncé concert.

Even worse? They’re not even legal. In December 2016, the federal government passed Better Online Ticket Sales Act, or the BOTS Act, which made it illegal for scalpers use computer software to purchase more tickets than allowed or bypass security measures.

But the Federal Trade Commission, the government agency tasked with enforcing the BOTS law, said it could not comment on whether any legal actions have been taken in the past year against scalpers using bots. “The FTC is taking the issue seriously,” it said in an emailed statement. “We are taking a hard look at the situation.”

So even with the new law, not much has changed. In 2017, Ticketmaster, the country’s largest ticketing company, blocked 5 billion bot attempts.

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