TICKETMASTER RESPONDS TO SCALPING REPORT

Ticketmaster has begun an internal review of its professional reseller accounts and employee practices in response to Wednesday’s report out of Canada alleging that the ticketing company runs a secret scalping scheme on the side.

CBC News and the Toronto Star had two reporters attend a convention for ticket brokers where a rep from Ticketmaster’s TradeDesk unit said the parent company has a blind eye toward the use of bots and other scalpers’ tools, not to mention a system for putting tickets into resellers’ hands.

In stating that “it is categorically untrue” that the company has a program to aid professional ticket resellers, Ticketmaster said, “Moving forward we will be putting additional measures in place to proactively monitor for this type of inappropriate activity.”

Here is the company’s full 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.”