A former operator of controversial ticketing ‘bots’ in the US has revealed how he once had the capacity to target 50 shows in one hour and buy 15,000 tickets in two minutes.
Ken Lowson told CBC’s Marketplace that he used bot software to jump ahead of queues in order to buy and resell tickets for more than a decade. He secured an average margin of about $25 (£21/€23) per ticket and made millions of dollars in the process.
The FBI pursued Lowson, but he settled a fraud case that was brought against him out of court by agreeing to pay $1m to the US Department of Justice.
The use of bots – which snap up tickets for events and automatically post them to secondary websites at inflated prices – has drawn criticism from across the entertainment industry.
New York has introduced legislation to outlaw bots, and the UK government is considering a similar amendment to a bill focusing on digital communications. Ontario in Canada is also set to table legislation to make bots illegal, but the software is still widely used.
Moreover, many bot operators are based outside North America, making legal enforcement of legislation difficult.
Lowson said that it took “890 mini-improvements to a system” to ensure he could “get tickets faster” over the course of several years.
“The whole system is rigged,” Lowson said.
“We would look for any little tiny advantage we could find that would cut just any amount of time off.”
However, despite the criticism of bots from the entertainment industry, Lowson claimed that it is easy to identify a bot.
“Take your credit card records and look at any card that bought more than two shows in different states in the same hour,” said Lowson, who added that promoters often like their shows selling out quickly, regardless of who has picked up the tickets.
“They say ‘oh, we sold out… in 10 seconds’. This big press thing happens when they get all this free PR,” he added.
Joe Berchtold, the chief operating officer of tour promoter Live Nation, which operates Ticketmaster, said that his company blocks about five billion bots every year.
“But even if we're 99-per-cent effective, that's 100 a minute that get through our system,” he acknowledged, before outlining the scale of the problem in relation to popular band Tragically Hip’s farewell tour this summer.
“Probably a third of the tickets went to bots, another third went to brokers who were just like fans, pounding away at the keyboard, but better trained, more aggressive at it, and maybe a third of them went to fans,” he said.
Although Ticketmaster imposes limits on the number of tickets that can be bought per customer, bot operators get around the rules by carrying out multiple transactions using dozens of credit cards and aliases, the report added.
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