North Carolina Legalizes Ticket Scalping, Temporarily

With the football season upon us and the big game coming up, you go looking for tickets on the second hand market and notice there are more vendors and probably lower prices! North Carolina has created more of a free market for second hand ticket sales. Now it is legal for any web site to resell tickets above face value. The web sites must guarantee customers that the tickets they buy are legitimate and will be received on time, or else your money back.

Along with the Ebay's and Stub Hub's of the world, now everybody will be allowed to resell tickets. This will drive down the price of the tickets on the second hand market as it will no longer just be two or three scalpers setting the prices. Now you will have 100's of companies scalping tickets to events, which will in turn add more quantity of tickets to the market and with more competition it will lower the value of the tickets on the second hand market.

Now what does the state of North Carolina get from this? They will probably tell you they done this for you, to keep you safe from frauds and bad tickets. Well that is just the feel good story; the real story is they were looking at taxing all ticket sales that were for profit. But there is some concern that it was not legal to do so, so they enacted legalize scalping temporarily for a year. They will also require companies selling tickets in North Carolina to report their sales to the state. This will allow the state to see how large the second hand ticket market is and ultimately, figure out if it is worth trying to tax.