Ngai Kwan, ticketing manager for Seattle Theatre Group, was scanning the ticketing screen as a Paramount show was about to go on sale. It wasn’t expected to sell out, so she wasn’t surprised to see normal, steady sales for the first minute.
Then, suddenly, the entire house locked up — that is, every seat was now in someone’s purchasing cart.
“It was like, ‘What’s going on, what’s going on?’ ” said Kwan. “It was happening so fast.”
Josh LaBelle, STG’s executive director, nodded, saying: “Humans can’t do that.”
For Kwan and LaBelle, this strange phenomenon is a sign of “ticket bots,” a common scourge of arts and entertainment presenters that sell tickets online. “Bots” is a term for software designed to beat website security in order to buy tickets in bulk, then resell them on a third-party website.
Ticket resale, at its pricier end called “ticket scalping,” is legal in Seattle. But bot critics argue that computerized purchasing prevents ordinary users from getting the seats they want, forcing them to buy from a third party at exorbitant prices. With a new state law outlawing bots going into effect in late July, ticket sellers are gearing up to take legal action against bot users in future sales.
The law affects ticket sales in general, from sporting events to theatrical performances, concerts and exhibitions. Bots are also banned in 13 other states, including Oregon and California.
It doesn’t mean an end to online-ticket scalping, but LaBelle is hopeful that it will make the problem more manageable. He estimates 35 to 40 percent of tickets for hot shows are often purchased by bots.
“What we’ve done with bots is hopefully taken a big link out of the chain here, making it harder for ‘scalpers’ to get their hands on inventory,” he said.
As Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson sees it, bots pose a twofold problem for consumers.
“It’s maddening … you want to buy a ticket for a show and this device impedes the consumer’s ability to do that,” said Ferguson, who originally proposed the law to the state legislature.
“It’s not just that they’re excluded from the event, but that they have to pay two or three times face value in order to attend the event,” he added.
A patron who wants to buy tickets to “Wicked” at the Paramount and does a Google search for “Wicked Seattle” will see, among the top results, a site called paramount.theatre-seattle.com — which, despite its name, is not affiliated with the theater. The highest-priced orchestra-level seat on that site might sell for upward of $600.
But a scroll down to the Paramount’s own site, stgpresents.org, the fifth search result, shows that an equivalent ticket would have cost $134. Similarly misleading ads pop up on a search for “Benaroya Hall,” which has also experienced ticket scalping for large events.
This sort of thing concerns Bernie Griffin, managing director of the 5th Avenue Theatre, who observes that some patrons may then assume that going to the theater is too expensive for them.
The 5th Avenue, she said, still tries to seat patrons who have purchased tickets from brokers.
“We always try our best to say, please go to the official website,” she said. “But if it’s a sold-out show, it’s a challenge.”
For theater tickets, resellers use URLs like “seattle-theatre.com” and, in the Paramount’s case, the name of the theater itself, acknowledging only in fine print that it isn’t affiliated with the venue.
Resellers often buy top spots on Google Ad searches so that they’re the first option on a search — for nonprofits like Seattle Theatre Group and 5th Avenue, it’s a challenge to compete for that spot.
“It’s not cheap, so it’s all part of what we have to do to alert the consumer to who is really the authentic ticket sale, and even that’s not always effective,” said LaBelle.
Not all ticket scalping is done by bots, but bots make the process for scalpers much easier.
Usually, websites block bulk purchasing by computers by looking for trademark signs that humans aren’t on the other end of the screen — a common test is the “Captcha” method that requires users to enter a set of letters and numbers displayed on the screen.
But this technology doesn’t catch every robot.
