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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-wonder-I-couldn't-get-tickets dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

When Adele fans went online to buy tickets to the pop superstar's world tour last year, they had no idea what exactly they were up against.

An army of tech-savvy resellers that included a little-known Canadian superscalper named Julien Lavallée managed to vacuum up thousands of tickets in a matter of minutes in one of the quickest tour sellouts in history.

The many fans who were shut out would have to pay scalpers like Lavallée a steep premium if they still wanted to see their favourite singer.

An investigation by CBC/Radio-Canada and the Toronto Star, based in part on documents found in the Paradise Papers, rips the lid off Lavallée's multimillion-dollar operation based out of Quebec and reveals how ticket website StubHub not only enables but rewards industrial-scale scalpers who gouge fans around the world.

CBC News obtained sales records from three U.K. shows that provide unprecedented insight into the speed and scale of Lavallée's ticket scam.

Despite a four-ticket-per-customer limit, his business snatched up 310 seats in 25 minutes, charged to 15 different names in 12 different locations.

The grand total? Nearly $52,000 worth of tickets at face value.

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/paradise-papers-stubhub-1.4395361


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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 14 2017, @11:33AM (2 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday November 14 2017, @11:33AM (#596750) Journal

    On the other hand, twice I got tickets to college football games by hanging around the gate waiting for anyone trying to unload their tickets. They were people who'd saved a little by purchasing a season pass bundle. I paid 50% of the price at the gate, which still had plenty of unsold tickets, so it seemed a decent deal for me. How much their tickets were discounted for being part of a season pass bundle, I have no idea. If they made money off me, it can't have been much.

    Both times, I found it tiresome. Maybe it's because I didn't go with a group of friends. Didn't buy and enjoy any beers or snacks. Or that I didn't know or care to know any of the football players, or study and understand the finer points of football. If singles meet at football games, I missed out on that too. Didn't know about tailgate parties then. The freedom to look at any part of the field I wanted, and not have my view controlled by the TV crew, turned out to be worthless to me. The crews are better than I am at focusing on the action and of course they have the best seats, so to speak. Not that I regularly watched the games on TV either.

    Whatever it is that drives fans to want in so badly to accept being scalped, I suspect the Nancy Reagan "Just Say No" approach to scalpers does not work. If it did, the business of cable TV companies would not exist. They wouldn't be able to scalp customers by forcing the purchase of huge and expensive bundles to get the few channels that were wanted. Nor would football teams be such money makers, with so many universities scrambling to cash in on them even to the point of neglecting education for the sake of more money from the games.

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  • (Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday November 14 2017, @10:56PM (1 child)

    by dry (223) on Tuesday November 14 2017, @10:56PM (#597040) Journal

    As a teenager living within walking distance from the stadium and coliseum, selling tickets was a way to make money. Friends dad, who worked out of town had season tickets, which when certain teams came to town, could be worth quite a bit of money, and even selling them for half price or less was still money. Used to even sell promotional tickets, for cheap. Also got to see lots of hockey games, football games and even world cup soccer. People would give away their tickets if no-one would buy them and of course we cheated. Send one kid in with a ticket who would pop an emergency door and in we'd all run.
    The problem isn't so much scalping, where people sell their tickets that they bought expecting to use and something came up or even occasionally to make money because of the team that was in town.
    What has changed is the professionals who can slurp up large amounts of tickets by basically butting into the line and are doing it for profit, and the ticket company, fucking TicketMaster, is implicit in it

    • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday November 15 2017, @05:56AM

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Wednesday November 15 2017, @05:56AM (#597173) Journal

      Hmm, yes, perhaps the sellers did make enough money off me and whoever else bought to make it worth their while. Not having cared to watch sports much and having gone to few concerts, I have very little experience with gate crashing, scalping, looking over the fence or through a hole, and all the rest of that sort of thing, though money was tight for me too. Most of the time, I used the ultimate method to save money: just don't go. I rarely go to movie theaters, and even more rarely go to sports events. Have not ever even tried to see 2 movies at the theater on one ticket.