Ticket scalping is buying tickets to an event and reselling them for more than the original price. It is most common for sporting and music events and may or may not be legal depending on local laws. Professional scalpers hire people to wait in line for tickets and need a sense of the market to make a profit. There is an ongoing debate about whether it should be regulated. Accidental scalpers sell extra tickets, but this may also be illegal in some areas.
Ticket scalping, also known as ticket resale, is the age-old practice of buying tickets to an event and reselling them for more than you paid for them. This is distinct from ticket brokers, firms that purchase blocks of event tickets for future resale, marking them based on what they believe the market will bear. Ticket scalping is most common for sporting and music events. Tickets to a sold out game or concert may be available at the right price. The stereotypical ticket scalping scenario is to go to the venue with no tickets and buy them from a cheat in the parking lot for two to three times what the scalper paid for them.
Professional ticket scalpers often hire young people to wait in line for tickets to popular events to go on sale, at which point they purchase as many as an individual is permitted. Ticket scalping requires a finely honed sense of the market. If the band you’re buying tickets for suddenly falls out of favor with the concert-going crowd, you may have to sell tickets at face value or even at a loss to recoup some of your original investment.
Ticket scalping may or may not be legal in your area – local laws vary widely. In areas where ticket scalping is illegal, it is usually defined as selling tickets to an event at the venue itself, on the day of the event. Selling tickets from a store or online days before the event, at any price, is usually quite legal.
There is an ongoing debate as to whether or not ticket scalping should be regulated. It would appear that if a person or business wants to invest time and money buying blocks of tickets in advance, running the risk that they may lose value, and there are people who are willing to pay much more than face value for those tickets, that scalping of tickets is supply and demand in its purest form. The other side of the argument is that if the ticket scalpers hadn’t bought all the tickets, the event wouldn’t have sold out and attendees could have bought face value tickets at the event itself.
Then there are the ‘accidental scalers’ – people who bought more tickets than they needed, not knowing friends would cancel on them, who try to recoup their costs by overselling tickets as they enter the event. In many areas, asking for more than face value for excess tickets is considered illegal ticket scalping, so make sure you know what the local laws are before attempting this.
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