How do scalpers get tickets so fast

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Mortgage rates are ridiculously low. You could save thousands During the onsale itself, you can target the speed and volume advantages that bots enjoy. A tool like a virtual waiting room can help neutralize both.

Bots that arrive before the onsale starts are placed in a pre-queue together with legitimate users. When the event launches, everyone in the pre-queue is randomized. This eliminates any advantage in arriving early or hitting the web page milliseconds after the start of the sale. Ticketing organizations can require visitors to enter known data, such as a membership number, to enter the virtual waiting room.

Finally, you can implement bot mitigation tactics on the ticket payment step similar to how you would on account creation to flag brute-force attacks like carding or card cracking.

Stopping fraudulent account creation also helps prevent online card fraud. Shifts in ticketing strategies can play an equally vital role in battling bots. With the expanded adoption of smartphones, mobile ticketing is a promising strategy to curb scalping. Mobile ticketing puts more control measures in place, such as tracking the transfer of tickets and limiting sales by geographic area.

In , Spanish festival Primavera Sound became the first major music festival to go completely mobile with their ticketing, and has features like a QR code that only appears two hours before the concert to keep tickets from being sold on secondary markets. The strategy certainly has tradeoffs, in that it is rigid and can be difficult to transfer tickets or purchase on behalf of someone else.

But it has documented effectiveness in battling scalpers and reducing tickets on the secondary market. High-demand shows like Hamilton continue to experiment with the approach. The ultimate goal is to restore fairness to online ticketing. Combined, you can tailor them to the unique angles of attack during each stage of the ticket-buying process to give you the best chance of achieving successful, bot-free onsales.

Everything you need to know about ticket bots. Published: 20 May Updated: 25 Feb What are ticket bots and are they all bad? How do ticket bots work? Who uses ticket bots? Are ticket bots illegal? Has legislation been effective? How do you beat bad ticket bots? When people talk about ticket bots, they are normally referring to these bad ticket bots. Prior to the ticket onsale Prior to the sale of tickets online, bad bots are used to create fake accounts or take over existing legitimate ones.

Account creation Fraudsters will abuse the account signup process by using bots to create accounts in bulk. Account takeover Instead of mass-creating new accounts, ticketing touts also try to get control over existing legitimate accounts. A ticket buying bot reserving and purchasing multiple sets of tickets. Scalpers use one or several of these ticket bots to reserve and purchase tickets: Expediting Scripted expediting bots use their speed advantage to blow by human users. But as reselling tickets has grown into an industry worth billions of dollars , technological advances are helping stop scalpers in their tracks and get real fans in the seats where they belong.

Helen Rolle is the venue business manager in charge of marketing and special events at Islington Assembly Hall, an art deco live music venue in north London. She says touts are a blight on the music industry and blames their getting away with it for so long on paper tickets.

So in September , Islington Assembly Hall partnered with ticketing startup Dice to tighten up security by getting rid of paper tickets. Dice, which launched in in partnership with digital design studio Ustwo, now sells 50 percent of the tickets to all shows at the Islington Assembly Hall, with the rest allocated to various promoters.

Dice's tickets live within its app, appearing as an animated QR code so you can't take a screenshot and send it to another phone. Russ Tannen, Dice's managing director in the UK, says that locking a ticket to a phone ensures that tickets will only go to people who are going to go and see the show. Dice is made for dedicated music fans. Its typical user is under 30 and goes to an exhausting-sounding four to five concerts a week.

But on the opposite side of the cultural world, another app is working to pull in young people who can't afford a hot ticket and would frankly rather curl up on the sofa and watch Netflix.

In the process, it's found a way to offer affordable seats that don't get resold. TodayTix has sold tickets to theater, dance, stand-up comedy and other live cultural events in New York, London and other cities since Rather than selling the best seat in the house three months in advance, the company focuses on pulling in people who are intimidated by high prices and sold-out hits.

It also hosts virtual "lotteries," offering tickets to high-demand and high-priced shows. That's partly because they're handed over to the winner in person at the theater and winners' IDs have to match the name on their account.

But it's also significant that most winners are only selected two to four hours before showtime. Artists hate to see their tickets fall into the hands of resellers. They don't profit from the artificially increased prices and hate to hear from disappointed fans. Before online ticket sales, concert tickets were typically sold over the phone, or through record shops.

Now they can be bought from anywhere in the world. This has massively increased the reach of ticket scalpers, who can target sold-out events in any country, and also allowed them to hide from the authorities of these countries. According to Ken, scalpers using ticket bots tend to base themselves in small countries without much government oversight - countries that are known as tax havens. The US enacted a national law outlawing bots in December last year.

So far, there have been no prosecutions. High-profile scalping continues. Websites like Shows on Sale or Ticket Crusader tell members when tickets are going on sale. They claim they help "beat the bots", but they can equally be used by scalpers with bots. One of the top-ranked websites selling bots is registered in Panama - the tiny Caribbean country known for a canal, good beaches, and tax evasion. A salesperson from the website said the software works in Australia and users can mask their identities with proxy IP addresses.

The first bots used by Ken's company were simple programs, like auto-fill, that saved his staff from filling out the same form over and over again.

A single bot could open hundreds of windows and run through the process of buying a ticket simultaneously on each window. Ken would assign a "power" to each show - a bot with power meant the equivalent of people buying tickets.

Ken's company also shaved milliseconds off ticket buying by exploiting the lag - or latency - of data signals crossing the country. For example, when tickets for the Rose Bowl - the Superbowl of US college football - went on sale, Wiseguy bought out of 1,