We’re all a bit jealous that Fred Again is currently popping off in Australia, but some losers have made the whole thing shittier for everyone by reselling tickets at over double the price.
Fred announced the surprise shows in an Instagram post and the frenzy to get tickets was INSANE, with many fans missing out. The British DJ actually apologised for the high demand, but now Triple J has reported that an online community used bots to buy tickets and resell them at a much higher price.
Ticketek said over a million people used their site to sell out Fred’s Sydney, Melbourne and Gold Coast shows in just hours. However, it's believed over a quarter of the tickets were bought by bots.
Once secured, scalpers resold the NZ$193 tickets for up to NZ$430. It’s believed some of them made up to $16,000 from the scam, with the total made by all scalpers reaching seven digits.
“We see about 17,000 or 18,000[tickets] up for sale using this method, and that’s probably an undercount in reality because there’s an incentive not to flood the market,” cybersecurity company founder Sam Crowther told Triple J.
“The cost base of all of these tickets comes to about $3.5 million and we’ve just taken what’s the average resale price on top of the retail, and that literally comes out to just over a million bucks.”
Fred Again has not announced any NZ shows (though we’re still praying he will), but there’s a high chance such a thing could happen here if he does. Scalping tickets is perfectly legal here unless the event is classed as a 'Major Event'. So far, no music concerts have been classified as one, just sporting events like the 2011 RWC.
Ticketek has safeguards to prevent botting and scalping, but, obviously, the scammers know how to work around them.
This kind of stuff is just a stain on the music community at large as it prices out legit fans who may not be able to afford the higher resell price. Please, don’t do it.
