Amid outcry over enabling scalpers, Ticketmaster revises its messaging
A blockbuster CBC report reveals a lucrative back channel for ticket reselling. After an initial shrug, the massive vendor has vowed to crack down on the practice. Critics aren’t buying it.
After reporters went undercover to reveal the underbelly of the ticket-reselling ecosystem, Ticketmaster was in a PR pickle.
Reporters from the Toronto Star and CBC News attended a ticket-selling conference in Las Vegas where representatives from Ticketmaster seemed ready to help would-be scalpers circumvent the company’s marketplace safeguards. The ticketing platform is a subsidiary of Live Nation and controls much of the live event ticket trade in North America.
The controversy centers around a product called TradeDesk that helps scalpers resell tickets.
In footage obtained by the journalists, a man purported to be a TradeDesk sales representative told them that the scalpers he works with have “literally a couple of hundred” Ticketmaster.com accounts apiece — a violation of Ticketmaster’s own terms of use — through which they can buy huge swaths of tickets for resale, and that Ticketmaster’s “buyer abuse” division does not investigate at least some TradeDesk users.
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