Were "Gleeks" Hoodwinked by Ticket Brokers?

I'm a little confused at the moment and I'm not really sure how to go about writing what I want to write. The situation has to do with concert tickets, or rather, buying concert tickets. I've always been frustrated with the ticket buying process. Though I understand that sometimes demand can be so high for a concert or sporting event that getting tickets for it can be difficult, but I also believe there is a scandalous underbelly of the ticketing business that works to gain unfair access to tickets simply to make a profit.

The secondary ticket market does fill a legitimate need. Sometimes people have tickets for an event they cannot attend, but much of this market is nefarious, legally sketchy and very lucrative to those who choose to rake in high-demand tickets before the general public has a chance to do so. I can't help but wonder just how they do it, but at the same time I suspect it's not legitimate.

One of my best friends is a Gleek. In case you've never heard of the term, a Gleek is a person who's fanatically obsessed with the Fox show Glee. Gleeks love the show and follow it religiously. They own both volumes of the shows soundtrack CD's and play them all the time. They read all the gossip columns online about what their favorite Gleester is up to at the moment, or what storylines are to come, blah, blah, blah. I am not a Gleek.

The other day my Gleek friend shoots me an email that just said, "Call me later. I have a big favor to ask." Curious, I gave him a call to find out what the favor was. It turns out that the Gleesters are going on tour and making a two-day stop at Radio City Music Hall. Tickets would be available for presale to American Express cardholders only on Friday and since I happen to have one, he asked if I would order him two tickets.

"No problem," I answered. It really wasn't, except that the tickets were going to be on sale at 10:00AM and I'd be in my classroom teaching at that time. He suggested, and I agreed with him, that I could just do it at 10:45 when I had a break. It was a presale after all, so the forty-five minute difference shouldn't be a big deal, or so we thought.

Friday came and I got a text message from my friend at 9:55 to remind me to place the order. I had given my students an assignment and so I was able to log in to Ticketmaster from my classroom pc. I logged in at 10:00 sharp and quickly found the show I was looking for, putting in all the information to order two seats, "American Express presale." The next step on the Ticketmaster website is the CAPTCHA, which is a security measure where you have to type in a fuzzy word or two to make sure you're not a robot or something. My pc wouldn't let me see the CAPTCHA.

I panicked and reloaded the page. Same result. I backed up and tried again...same result. I logged into my iPhone, losing precious minutes as I navigated the site all over again on my tiny phone screen. That didn't work. Finally, I called my friend and gave him my credit card information so he could try it on his end. By then, it was at least 10:10. The effort proved fruitless as my friend's attempts at purchasing two tickets yielded no results. I felt bad, thinking that all of that wasted time lost him his tickets.

The situation nagged at me all day. Were there really that many Gleeks out there who would snatch up all tickets for two shows in just ten minutes? My suspicions grew. When I got home from work, I decided to take a gander at StubHub, a secondary ticket marketplace, to see what I could see. Sure enough, the site had no less than six pages of tickets available for both Glee shows, selling at up to $499 apiece! The highest regularly-priced tickets had been $94.

I remembered reading a news item the other day about these three guys from California who had been busted for hacking into the Ticketmaster system, among others, and scooping up tickets en masse so they could resell them for profit. In just six years, from 2002 to 2008, the three pocketed over $29 million from their sales. They did so by hacking past the CAPTCHA system and snatching up all of the tickets before average Joe's like me can get a hold of them. The only way any Gleek can get to see the Glee concert is to fork over a hard earned $500 to these guys through any of the various ticket brokering websites.

All of this just makes me wonder if there's still something sinister going on here. I'm sure there are a lot of Gleeks out there like my friend, but for that many of them to all have American Express cards to buy all of those presale tickets in a matter of seconds...you'd have to wonder, too. Did so many of them change their minds before they even had their tickets in hand, placing them for sale on secondary ticket brokering sites for five times the price? Somehow I don't think it was all Gleeks that scooped up these tickets. All I want to know is how they did it!

Sources:

Personal experience

Kreps, Daniel. ""Not Guilty" Pleas for three men accused of Ticketmaster hacking." Rolling Stone 03 Mar 2010: n. pag. Web. 6 Mar 2010. .