FTC Staff Perspective Recaps Online Event Tickets Workshop

A new paper from the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection provides a look at the information covered in the FTC’s “That’s the Ticket” workshop held in June 2019 on online event ticketing.

While this is a challenging time for the live event industry and the online ticket marketplace, FTC staff believes that its perspective paper, which highlights a number of a consumer protection challenges in the ticket marketplace, will be useful going forward.

The paper highlights several practices discussed during the workshop, including the intentional underpricing of event tickets to consumers and how ticket availability is affected by factors such as holdbacks, staggered sales, and the use of bots to purchase large blocks of tickets for later resale. It also discusses the practice of disclosing mandatory fees only after consumers select their tickets. The paper further summarizes discussions of speculative ticket selling—when ticket resellers list tickets that they do not actually possess—and of ticket resellers that use deceptive website URLs and landing pages to make themselves look like primary sellers.

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