Black is back but guess who is scalping your Coldplay tickets?

Remember that old dus-ka-tees outside cinema halls? Well, black is back, only this time it is online. When the virtual gates to Coldplay’s box office opened last Sunday, fans found themselves trapped in an endless digital queue.Meanwhile, the tickets were gone. Only to reappear on reseller sites, flipped at ten times the price.‘Ticket scalping’ is a shadowy world where bots and its purveyors quietly scoop up heaps of tickets in seconds, and then resell them at eye-watering prices. Coldplay may have brought this issue into the spotlight, but ticket scalping isn’t limited to concerts. These days if you’re itching to catch a hotly anticipated movie premiere, IPL finals or even a festival, you’ll probably have to stump up way more than ticket price.Take Coldplay’s tour, for instance. Tickets are now listed anywhere between Rs 38,000 and a jaw-dropping Rs 8,16,777, compared to their original prices of Rs 6,450 and Rs 37,000. For Dua Lipa’s concert at the MMRDA grounds in November and Bryan Adams at Nesco in December, it’s the same story.Cybersecurity and data privacy consultant Ritesh Bhatia, explains how these bots manage to waltz past queues. “As soon as an event opens for bookings, big players like Viagogo and Gigsberg unleash their infrastructure of automated bots, high-speed servers, multiple computers and routers with which they can log in, buy tickets and log out in milliseconds before most humans even get a chance,” explains Bhatia, adding that automated bots are programmed to bypass captchas entirely. “To stay under the radar, hackers also use multiple bots to mask bulk purchases from the same IP address, which could trigger red flags.”The reason a website can’t tell if it’s a real person or a bot buying the ticket, according to Rakshit Tandon, director of training at Future Crime Research Foundation, is sloppy coding. “Cybersecurity is often treated like an afterthought by companies and hackers know exactly how to exploit the bugs to bypass codes and queues,” he says. “We’ve also noticed this trend during peak travel seasons, especially with IRCTC,” he adds about railway tickets resurfacing at inflated prices. “Travel agents often collaborate with hackers who deploy bots to acquire tickets in bulk and resell them at a premium,” he explained. The solution? Patching. “It’s just a matter of changing the code to make it more secure,” Tandon says, adding that regular vulnerability assessments should be a standard practice for any online business and that many Indian companies are only now waking up to these cybersecurity issues—probably spurred by data breaches in Zomato and BigBasket.medium“Scalping is basically the digital version of the old-school black market for movie tickets, which the movie industry solved with digitisation and accountability, so why can’t others?” asks digital rights activist Nikhil Pahwa. And while ticket scalpers are outwitting fans and legitimate buyers, platforms can fight back. “By limiting the number of tickets an individual can buy or staggering ticket releases, especially for large-scale events, ticket scalping can be prevented,” he says.Interestingly, Shreyas Srinivasan, founder of Paytm Insider, took to social media to suggest an innovative approach. “I think it’s time we changed ticketing format of large events to mimic IPO subscriptions. Current queue formats have awful user experience. Better we get all interested customers to set up UPI mandates and then issue tickets through the best possible allocation algorithm,” he wrote on X. Pahwa suggests that platforms like BookMyShow handle resales directly. “They could then avoid this whole mess,” he says. Some Indian event sites have already adopted this approach. Insider, for instance, has long allowed users to transfer tickets via their website. This August, Zomato introduced a ‘Book Now, Sell Anytime’ feature, letting users resell tickets for eligible events directly on the app at a price based on demand with a dynamic price cap. A year ago, Raghav Ahooja from Gurugram took a stand against the multinational ticket resale platform Viagogo by filing a complaint with the Grievance Appellate Committee (that deals with complaints and violations related to computer resources) after experiencing the pain of trying to buy tickets for the India-Pakistan match during the ICC Cricket World Cup 2023. “Within seconds of logging in, all the tickets were gone. No matter which match I searched for, Viagogo was always the first site to pop up, selling tickets originally priced at a maximum of Rs 25,000 for Rs 2-4 lakh,” he recalled. Ahooja had never heard of the platform before, which prompted him to dig deeper. “It turned out to be a UK-based company involved in lawsuits across multiple countries. But they rake in so much from the scalping business that fines hardly faze them.” However, nothing much came of his complaint as the committee felt it was not in their purview.About the Coldplay ticket row, BookMyShow says it had filed a complaint with police. “We are proactively working with them to provide complete support in the investigation of this matter,” said a spokesperson. In the US where the concert resale market has ballooned to a $5 billion industry and ticket scalping now stretches to Broadway, restaurant reservations and even immigration status meetings, the country introduced the BOTS Act (Better Online Ticket Sales) in 2016 to outlaw scalper bots. Yet eight years on, from Taylor Swift to Bruce Springsteen concerts, fans are still locked in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, trying to outpace the scalpers.