Bots in the US will not buy tickets

The heroes of the Big Bang Theory series are getting ready to buy tickets for the festival Comic-Con: you need to press a button in the first second after opening the queue. Season 7, Series 14

For many years, the US concert industry has suffered from bots . Specially created programs quickly buy / book tickets for events with a limited number of places - where there will be a guaranteed full house. Concerts of popular bands, fan festivals like Comic-Con, in turn for embassies (this is in other countries, not in the USA), etc. A living person has almost no chance to press a button before a bot.

Using computer programs to quickly purchase a ticket or intercept an auction lot at the last second is sometimes compared to financial scalping . The term was born in the stock market, where such bots appeared first. They are traditionally used for intraday speculative operations in the stock, currency and commodity markets.

Nobody plans to ban scalping in the stock market. Nowadays, more than half of all turnover is provided by trade bots. They provide market liquidity and guarantee a small spread between purchase and sale rates, that is, they really help people sell or buy securities at a more favorable market rate.
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With tickets, the situation is different. Here, bots perform an exclusively destructive function, not ensuring the liquidity of the market, but on the contrary - destroying it. It happens that in a few seconds after the tickets appear on sale, bots buy them completely. The only possibility for an ordinary person to buy a ticket is to use such software yourself or to buy a ticket at a higher price from speculators.

The problem has reached such a scale that the United States has decided to deal with it at the legislative level. In the very near future, the development and use of bots for buying tickets in the United States will become a crime.

On December 7, 2016, the United States Congress passed the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS Act) law, which prohibits bypassing computer security systems introduced to restrict ticket sales on websites and online services. The restriction applies to public events with more than 200 visitors. Violations will be treated as “dishonest or deceptive acts” and punished by the Federal Trade Commission or state authorities in accordance with the punishment provided by the state authorities for “dishonest or deceptive acts”.

It should be noted that the new law received the full support of the legislators and was adopted very quickly. Last week, the Senate voted for him unanimously, and on December 7, the House of Representatives passed the law. Now the BOTS Act has been sent to the president for signature, and almost no one doubts that he will give the new law a move.

Representatives of the concert industry have long known about the problem, and the authorities have become interested in it this year. The office of the Attorney General of New York conducted a special investigation and found out that the bots are buying up tens of thousands of tickets to concerts, festivals and sports matches in New York. The investigation revealed that dealers then resell tickets with an increase in price by an average of 49%, but sometimes their margin exceeds 1000%. In one case, tickets were sold with a price increase of 7,000%. According to the Attorney General, this is a very easy way to make money, which should be considered illegal.

In 2013, experts estimated that bots buy up about 60% of tickets for popular events. In the investigation, the prosecutor's office cited the example of one broker who managed on December 8, 2014, using bots, to buy 1012 tickets for a U2 concert, despite the organizers' limit of 4 tickets in one hands. By the end of the day, 15,000 tickets for this concert were put up for sale on the broker's website.

The first Senate hearing on the new bill took place in September. Before the deputies were made by the industry and event organizers. They confirmed that tickets are sold out very quickly by bots - and then they are set for resale at sites like StubHub and TicketsNow with large margins.

The bill was supported by the National Association of Ticket Merchants (National Association of Ticket Brokers) - an association of more than 200 merchants who resell tickets without the use of software bots. “People should not compete with programs to make a purchase,” said the association’s executive director.

Technically, it is very difficult to limit the use of bots, they even know how to solve “captcha” faster than humans. Probably, a legislative ban and real criminal punishment for developers and users of such programs is the only possible way.