When Cameron Nauceder learned that hillbilly comedian Ginger Billy was coming to Rutland, he decided to get tickets to surprise his wife. “So I hopped on Google,” he said. He typed in “Ginger Billy tickets, Paramount Theatre, Rutland” and clicked the first link that came up.
“It brought me to a website, and it had the Paramount Theatre logo and the address right at the top of the page,” Nauceder said. The independent general contractor from Washington, Vt., bought two balcony seats for $310. Expensive, but he figured that was because people love the buff, bearded, backwoods comic.
When he and his wife got to the theater for the October 4 show, the six-foot-two-inch Nauceder, a disabled Marine veteran, couldn’t squeeze into the tight balcony row. “My legs physically could not fit between the seat back and the seat in front of me,” he said. They went to the box office to ask if they could move.
When Nauceder presented his tickets, the box office agent responded, “‘Oh, you didn’t purchase these from us,'” Nauceder recalled. “I said, ‘Excuse me?'”
That’s when Nauceder learned that he had paid triple the price of the balcony seats.
Predatory ticket resellers have flooded the marketplace. They scoop up seats for live entertainment, jack up the price and offer them on websites that look like the performance venue’s. Flame emojis pop up. “Limited inventory,” the sites warn, even when plenty of tickets are available. “Act now before your tickets are sold!”
Some sellers offer tickets they don’t yet own. These practices overcharge consumers, cheat artists, and cost presenters time, money and their reputations.
And for the most part, it’s legal.
“It happens at every show,” Paramount marketing and box office manager Janel Soren said. She estimated that 20 audience members at every performance present tickets they bought from a reseller; others with fraudulent tickets may never realize it.
When resellers accomplish their goal, Paramount executive director Eric Mallette said, “the purchaser never really knows. They don’t know that ticket they bought was four times the price it should have been. They don’t know the ticketing fees were 12 times what they should traditionally be. They don’t know any of that. They just buy their tickets and come to the theater.”
“And if it’s happening to this little theater in Rutland, Vt.,” Soren said, “it’s happening all across the country.”
It is legal to resell tickets in Vermont. State law has consumer protection measures in place and prohibits the use of bots, computer software that allows users to sweep up tickets, but the attorney general has not charged anyone for fraudulent ticket resale.
Reselling tickets is a multibillion-dollar industry, said Stephen Parker, executive director of the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). He cited a 2022 Bloomberg report showing that resale ticket prices on StubHub had increased more than 100 percent since 2019, while the face value of tickets had increased only 10 percent.
“It’s truly a game of Whac-A-Mole. ” Alex Crothers
The market remains hot. More than 9,000 tickets were recently offered on StubHub and Vivid Seats for U.S. stops on the highly anticipated Oasis reunion tour — before tickets had gone on sale, Parker said.
He noted the activity in a letter to U.S. senators urging them to pass the Fans First Act, which would ban such speculative sales along with a host of other predatory practices. “We can’t determine the exact markup on the fake tickets,” Parker wrote, “given that there are no tickets available for the public to buy, let alone see the price.”
Consumers who pay too much for tickets have less to spend on a night out, Parker told Seven Days. Venues lose food and drink sales. Artists sell less merch. Audience members may spend less money on dinner before a show or drinks after, meaning other area businesses take a hit and local governments lose tax revenue.
“That money is leaving the community and going into the pocket of somebody who is not contributing to the ecosystem and not contributing to a show,” Parker said.
“It affects the room as well,” said Jordan Gechtman, marketing manager at the Higher Ground nightclub in South Burlington. Bands playing a sold-out show deserve a full house. But resellers, who can recoup their costs quickly with markups, may not sell all the tickets they have. Playing in a half-empty venue “is challenging,” Gechtman said. “And that also affects how we ultimately bring them back or shape their future, or what their tours look like.”
“There’s a lot of ripple effects when you’ve got people skimming cream off the surface who aren’t invested in the health of the industry,” Higher Ground co-owner Alex Crothers said. Resellers, he said, can make more money than artists and venues do.
Combatting the bad actors is difficult. Some states have laws aimed at them, but Parker and others in the industry say federal legislation is needed. A 2016 federal law outlawing bots has proven to be ineffective.
The Fans First Act, cosponsored by U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), was introduced in December 2023 and is awaiting action in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. The most comprehensive of three ticketing bills currently pending in Congress, it is backed by NIVA and Fix the Tix, a coalition of 35 organizations that represent artists, venues, promoters and other creators. Among other actions, the bill would strengthen the 2016 law, ban the sale of speculative tickets, outlaw deceptive marketing practices and require ticket sellers to show the full itemized cost of tickets, including any fees, from the moment the transaction begins.
“If we got that, that would be huge for the consumer,” Parker said, but time is running out. If the Fans First Act is not signed into law by the end of the current legislative session, it will need to be reintroduced in January when the new session begins.
In the meantime, venue operators are trying to stay ahead of the scammers and educate the public — Rule No. 1: Always shop at the venue’s website.
Flynn marketing director Kevin Sweeney estimates that he and his colleagues at the Burlington theater spend 30 hours a week on anti-scam efforts. This spring, the Flynn added a half-time box office supervisor whose primary job is to thwart fraud. Jillian Senyi tracks suspicious behavior, watches for use of stolen credit cards and supports patrons who have lost money. When she confirms that people are selling Flynn tickets for more than face value, she issues a refund, recalls the tickets and permanently suspends the buyer’s account.
Staff at the Flynn and other venues monitor their social media accounts to delete posts and block users offering tickets for sale. Swindlers might say things like, “My dad’s really sick, and I can’t make the show, and I was so looking forward to it. Please help me out.”
Robin Johnson, founder and general manager of the Stone Church in Brattleboro, said he’s seen such posts before a show has sold a single ticket. When a show is selling well or has sold out, Johnson no longer posts that news because it triggers a flurry of resellers.
“There’s keywords that they consistently use,” Higher Ground’s Gechtman said. “‘DM me.’ ‘Message me.’ My favorite is ‘My husband won’t let me go.'”
While big-name acts attract the most resale activity, Gechtman said she’s seen resale ads for the club’s Taylor Swift-inspired dance party, “which is not particularly hot.” Scamming, she added, “is absolutely pervasive and harmful at every level of live events.”
Higher Ground’s ticketing platform, See Tickets, has algorithms built in to flag suspicious buyers, Crothers said, but they are imperfect, and scalpers and bots adapt. “They can just keep evolving faster than we can come up with systems to protect the customer,” he said. “It’s truly a game of Whac-A-Mole.”
When scammers buy tickets with stolen credit cards, venues may take two losses: the first when they pay charge-backs, which are refunds to credit card holders; and the second when they pay the performer. Some performers get a percentage of ticket sales. “So if gross income was X, but then after the charge-backs, gross income is X less 5 percent, the theater has to eat that 5 percent because that artist is long gone,” the Paramount’s Mallette said. “We’ve settled the show. They’re in Paducah by now.”
While selling tickets at inflated prices is legal, selling one ticket multiple times is not. When that happens, the first person to arrive gets a seat; the rest are told their tickets are no good. In both scenarios, venues end up taking the blame.
“We had nothing to do with it, but they want to be mad at somebody, and we’re the closest people,” Crothers said.
When Higher Ground presented Noah Kahan at the Burlington waterfront last summer, someone set up an account on Eventbrite and started selling tickets they didn’t have, Crothers said. Interim general manager Nick Mavodones III had to turn away patrons with fake tickets. Fans cried, he said.
When Higher Ground brought Kahan back to play at the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction in September, it took an additional step to prevent scalping and fraud. Higher Ground did not deliver tickets until the morning of the concert, so that fans would know that any tickets offered elsewhere earlier were fake.
Still, at the box office that night, Mavodones said, “we had to turn away five girls who bought tickets from their friends — they said.” Those tickets had already been scanned.
At the Ginger Billy show in Rutland, staffers wrote down the Paramount Theatre box office web address for Cameron Nauceder and his wife, who added it to her phone contacts. They now know to seek tickets directly from the venue.
“What worries me when it comes to sustainability of organizations like the one that I run,” Paramount executive director Mallette said, “are the untold number of people that go to a reseller site, presume it to be legitimate, see an incredibly enhanced ticket price and say, ‘Well, that show’s not for me,’ or worse yet, ‘That venue’s not for me.'”
They close their screen, he said, “and they never look at us again.”
Disclaimer: Seven Days sells tickets online, too. Our ticketing manager works with venues and events promoters directly. Seven Days Tickets does not resell tickets that have been purchased elsewhere. Find more information at sevendaystickets.com.
Don’t Be Duped
The first thing music and theater fans should do to ensure they buy real tickets at fair prices is start at the venue’s website. Don’t type the show and venue names into a search engine. That’s likely to bring up reseller sites first, and many of those are designed to deceive. Ticketsonsale.com, for example, displays the Flynn’s marquee across the top of its page when selling Flynn tickets.
Signs that you’re buying from a reseller include:
- high prices
- high fees tacked on during the checkout process
- tickets that don’t include a seat number but instead say something like “Orchestra, Row Q,” etc.
- alerts urging you to buy quickly
If you suspect you have bought tickets from a reseller, call the venue box office immediately so staffers can investigate. Plus, the venue needs your contact information in case there are changes to the show. Paramount Theatre marketing and box office manager Janel Soren recalls people who paid a reseller $500 for two Righteous Brothers tickets that the theater had sold for $142. They traveled from Connecticut to see the show, which had been canceled because one of the singers had COVID-19.
File complaints about ticket resellers with the Vermont Attorney General’s Consumer Assistance Program. Call 800-649-2424 or email ago.cap@vermont.gov.
Keep the faith! When shows sell out, there are ways to find real tickets at fair prices. Higher Ground marketing manager Jordan Gechtman recommends searching on hyperlocal websites, such as the Facebook page Black Market-U, or going to CashorTrade, a Burlington-based platform that requires sellers to offer tickets at face value or less.
CashorTrade operates like a social network, cofounder and CEO Brando Rich said, explaining why its approach works. Members have profiles. They can chat, leave each other reviews and flag questionable posts. “If something is posted above face value, within 30 seconds, it’s flagged, and it gets automatically suspended,” Rich said.
CashorTrade is free for sellers, charges 10 percent to buyers — waived for those with the $4-per-month Gold membership — and offers a money-back guarantee. It has 470,000 members across the U.S. and in 46 other countries and is working to integrate its platform with those of primary ticket sellers.
More than a ticketing platform, Rich said, CashorTrade is “a movement of fans coming together from all over the world to support one another at face value.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “That’s Notthe Ticket | Predatory ticket resellers are increasingly sophisticated in duping fans. And it’s mostly legal.”
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This article appears in The Tech Issue 2024.
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