CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

An option I'd like to see implemented is to make the customer put down a bond. Besides charging the customer for the ticket, also charge them another higher amount that gets refunded x days after the concert. If the customer is found to be a scalper don't return the bond.

Scalpers can't pay high bond amounts at scale combined with the risk of not having the bond returned.

Also filtering people who don't own much to begin with?

Yeah when I was a teen I might have had $40 for a show but not $500 for a bond.

How do you figure out whether they're a scalper or not?

How do you determine scalpers? I buy 6 tickets for me and my friends and we all get sick. Are we scalpers? I buy 1 ticket and a work trip gets foisted on me the next day so I try to resell. Am I a scalper?

Won’t everyone just charge the ticket buyer the price of the bond? So this still only harms the fans that want to see the show. The scalpers just need to have more up front capital in your system.

For popular acts, when scalpers are selling at 10x or more the base price, the bond would have to be pretty high to put the scalpers off, and that would be a problem for many genuine customers. Unless the bond is silly high, that being defined as high enough that it significantly messes with fans, it would still be worth it even if the scalper is noticed and the bond not returned.

> If the customer is found to be a scalper don't return the bond.

This is how most suggestions for solving the problem fall down: how do you, with any reliability, or at least reliably avoiding false positives, detect a scalper?

This is the issue with most proposed solutions here.

Artists (bands) want to sell tickets to fans and people who appreciate them. And many (probably most) have very little money.

They are able to scrape and save for a ticket. But not some bond deposit, arbitrary ticket fees, auction pricing, etc..

If you resell, you're a scalper.

If you return the ticket to the venue/band, you get your money back, get the bond back, and you're not a scalper.

Charging the ticket buyer the price of the bond doesn't only harm the fans that want to see the show. It also harms the band that won't have fans come see the show. It's an incentive for the band to buy back unused tickets. Bands currently don't do that.

Fans demanding ticket buy backs puts pressure on bands to put an end to scalping. It's fans who pay the entire cost of scalping now, not bands.

Anyone who sells is a scalper.

This is easy to notice. You can't go around saying "I've got two front row" when the mere act of saying it gets you noticed. You can't post online you're selling tickets because it gets you noticed.

Only the venue/band sells. Only the venue/band buys back tickets, and they're required to buy them back at the price they were sold. Full refund of ticket price and bond.

If noticing scalpers is easy, the bond doesn't need to be silly high. Catch a scalper and you get 50% of their bond.

That assumes the vendor runs a buy-back scheme. That would cost and the cost paid by all ticket buyers, if one isn't in place already.

Openly selling is only part of the problem.

How do you distinguish between someone buying tickets as a gift and someone who sold them on in a manner you did not detect? What about group bookings, do you want the ticket seller to collect full ID of all the intended audience members? After that, what if the group of friends changes - who pays the admin fees?

Your idea isn't terrible, but it is far from perfect.

> If noticing scalpers is easy, the bond doesn't need to be silly high.

That is a huge if. Many scalpers are rather experienced and organised, while some will be very easy to spot I suspect a lot of them won't be, at least not without a bunch of false positives that will inconvenience genuine buyers.

> That assumes the vendor runs a buy-back scheme. That would cost

What would it cost? The vendor runs software that sells tickets. The same software can buy tickets back, invalidate the ticket IDs, and issue new tickets with new IDs. This feature can be part of the software at no additional cost.

Not running a buy-back scheme possible costs more to customers because of today's scalpers.

> How do you distinguish between someone buying tickets as a gift and someone who sold them on in a manner you did not detect?

As the venue/band, you don't need to. Sell to anyone.

As the customer, when you're buying from a scalper you know you're buying at a higher price than the advertised price.

> what if the group of friends changes - who pays the admin fees?

I don't see what admin fees must exist for this. Software manages anything. Printing a new ticket is cheap.

> Many scalpers are rather experienced and organised.

So is law enforcement. Scalpers can't hide the fact that they're selling.