Ticketmaster denies illegal scalping practices

Yesterday, a report published by the CBC alleged that Ticketmaster spokespersons encouraged scalpers to engage in illegal scalping activities as Ticketmaster also received a cut of the inflated ticket prices. Today, via a press release, Ticketmaster denied that it engages in such practices. Ticketmaster stated, in part, "It is categorically untrue that Ticketmaster has any program in place to enable resellers to acquire large volumes of tickets at the expense of consumers." However, the release did not deny that its spokespersons made comments encouraging illegal acitvity to CBC undercover agents. See Ticketmaster's full response below.

Ticketmaster Statement
It is categorically untrue that Ticketmaster has any program in place to enable resellers to acquire large volumes of tickets at the expense of consumers.

Ticketmaster’s Seller Code of Conduct specifically prohibits resellers from purchasing tickets that exceed the posted ticket limit for an event. In addition, our policy also prohibits the creation of fictitious user accounts for the purpose of circumventing ticket limit detection in order to amass tickets intended for resale.

A recent CBC story found that an employee of Ticketmaster’s resale division acknowledged being aware of some resellers having as many as 200 TradeDesk accounts for this purpose (TradeDesk is Ticketmaster’s professional reseller product that allows resellers to validate and distribute tickets to multiple marketplaces). We do not condone the statements made by the employee as the conduct described clearly violates our terms of service.

The company had already begun an internal review of our professional reseller accounts and employee practices to ensure that our policies are being upheld by all stakeholders. Moving forward we will be putting additional measures in place to proactively monitor for this type of inappropriate activity.