[cehrnrooth]

This is really interesting, because I had the same experience happen to me yesterday (the domain was emeraldsummitadvisors.com).

I didn't find much discussion about it, but one theory I saw was that for high-value tickets Stubhub will act as an intermediary to verify the tickets or prevent the buyer and seller from knowing who the other person is (because the original buyer info is typically on a ticket or revealed during the transfer, and the new buyer info is given to the seller).

I assume this is to cut down on scams and other issues related to claims of not receiving tickets.

[JohnFen]

> I assume this is to cut down on scams and other issues related to claims of not receiving tickets.

If that's the case, why are they using cutouts for it? I'd think that if their purpose was legitimate, they wouldn't feel the need to disguise their identity.

[filmgirlcw]

I'd think it would be to prevent being "seen" by Ticketmaster/AXS/whoever and then banned or whatever for scalping activity is my thought. I think there is probably a very good reason to hide their identity or at least obscure it.

A similar thing happened when Uber started in New York City. You needed a livery license to drive there, so they created dozens of livery companies (all with German names) that they registered the drivers to, as a way I think, to make it harder for the city to try to shut them down (the city didn't shut them down but I think that was part of their risk calculus). Lyft originally didn't register liveries for its drivers and was banned from New York until it spun that up and it delayed their entry into the market by a few weeks.

[jaywalk]

Right. Just use [e-mail] or something like that. There is obviously some deception going on here, whether it's StubHub or someone else.

[cehrnrooth]

It could be about optics. They might prefer people direct their anger at a random non-existent stranger for paying above face value than have them direct their anger at Stubhub.

That said, shifting blame for high prices isn't a new problem, so it's surprising the domains were all registered in the last 6 months.

Maybe it's a bigger project around market making and price optimization. I priced mine around 70% of the price of similar available tickets (since mine hadn't sold in the 3 weeks I had them listed) and they sold later that day.

[djbusby]

What a dumb way to try to hide. And, inevitably, someone discovered some odd things. Now we can be mad about two things: the Crime and the Coverup.

[duxup]

> they wouldn't feel the need to disguise their identity

Wouldn't that tip off the fake seller if they saw the email?

Such things are such a game of whack a mole that I would approach it as invisibly as possible if I were trying to sniff out fake sellers on my site. Even if just to hope to keep them unaware.

[WirelessGigabit]

Isn't there something that you buy the tickets on LiveNation and then via the website sell them on StubHub. Like they know that the tickets are real...

[hinkley]

That seems like five lines of code to me...