Your chances of getting tickets to a ball game or your favorite show have gone way up! Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill that makes "ticket bots" illegal. Bots are nasty computer programs run by scalpers that hoard tickets. Scalpers then re-sell the tickets at double or triple face value. Consumer Reporter Jesse Jones did the work to help make this law.
With the signing of House Bill 1091, Washington will join 13 other states that have outlawed ticket bots. Attorney General Bob Ferguson said this new law will allow his office to sue scalpers who use the rogue software. It will also limit the tickets that end up on the secondary market for a higher price.
Josh Labelle runs the Seattle Theatre Group. He came to me months ago, frustrated with the bots issue. Labelle said bots have been an issue for years and the venues aren’t the only ones who pay the price.
“This has been going on for three or four years and we got a stack of complaint letters from the general public and it was finally enough is enough,” exclaimed Labelle. “We finally landed on this notion of outlawing bots as a way of making it harder for the ticket inventory to get in the wrong hands.”
For example, let's say tickets go on sale for a concert at the Paramount for $75. Bots work faster than humans and can hold down hundreds of tickets, up to 40 percent of a venue according to Labelle. Then those behind the bots can sell the tickets at double the face value on other sites.
“Forget about what we had intended, what we thought the prices would be -- they go up and up and fraud increases,” explained Labelle.
But with the bot ban in place, Labelle can help with the investigation of scalpers who decide to steal seats from consumers.
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