New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says the state has reached settlements with six ticket brokers he says used illegal software to snap up hundreds of thousands of tickets to performance events all over the state. The tickets were scalped at greatly inflated prices on ticket resale sites like StubHub and Vivid Seats.
Four of the companies were from New York and one from Connecticut. All used software “bots” to watch for tickets going on sale and automatically buy them up before regular customers had a chance of getting one at the regular price.
The settlements require the companies to get licensed to operate in New York, to ditch using the bots and to pay more than $4 million in penalties if they want to stay in business.
Schneiderman says his office also tracked down the company in Iowa that wrote the code for one of the ticketbots and got an order forcing them to stop selling it.