Ticketmaster plans to cancel roughly 50,000 resale tickets to Oasis’ U.K. reunion concerts over violations of the company’s terms and services, Billboard has confirmed.
According to Ticketmaster, the canceled tickets were purchased using techniques that have been forbidden for the Oasis tour. Those include a prohibition on purchasing more than four tickets per household, per show, and using multiple identities to buy up tickets — though those rules often aren’t enough to deter both amateur and professional ticket scalpers from using VPNS or multiple credit cards to try and purchase tickets beyond the limit.
The news was originally reported by the BBC.
Ticket purchase limits have long been a scourge for ticket scalpers, and a recent report from the National Independent Talent Organization found that a small cottage industry has popped up in the last decade to help scalpers defeat the four tickets-per-household limit.
The services offered by these unscrupulous players include VPNs to hide a buyer’s IP address and bots that speed up the checkout process — the latter of which are generally considered to be illegal under the rarely enforced BOTS Act of 2016. That could change as soon as next year, thanks to a number of proposed bipartisan anti-ticket scalping laws that aim to beef up enforcement of the act.
Ticketmaster says the canceled tickets will be sold back to fans in the coming days and weeks. However, while some lucky fans will get a chance to see Oasis as a result, the number still falls far short of meeting real demand. There were 1.4 million tickets on sale when Oasis announced their U.K. tour in August — but more than 10 million fans from 158 countries have logged in to try and buy tickets.
Ticket onsales are often fast-paced affairs with thousands of tickets selling per second, making it impossible to stop sneaky buyers from trying to overstep ticket purchase limits. However, after those sales wrap, companies like Ticketmaster have months to review purchase and transactional data to identify problematic transactions. Those deemed to have broken the rules generally have their purchases refunded to them and their tickets reassigned to other buyers with new barcodes.
Live Nation has hailed those efforts as a success, noting that while it isn’t illegal to scalp tickets in the U.K., the enforcement system punishing buyers who went past Ticketmaster’s own terms and conditions has helped keep thousands of tickets off the secondary market.
