[monster_truck]

They're fuckin hounds that's how. Know someone who was the CTO for a competitor in sports tickets which was later acquired by them. They had hundreds of people on payroll who would stand in line at box offices to buy up anything they could, along with an internal tool that would let them enter seat details to get a price range to determine if the scalpers selling theirs were worth the asking price. Was maybe 7 years before it became easy enough for basically anyone to buy a product/service to bot checkouts. Was a very 'boots on the ground', logistically intensive business that the CEO had done solo for years before scaling up.

Any tactic you could imagine was employed to deter this. They'd hire PIs to collect names and inconvenience them with BS regulatory complaints and lawsuits, rearrange street sweeping/sidewalk steaming schedules to have their cars towed, etc. When things came to a head they had just worked out a deal with cash courier chain to supply their employees with cash to buy the tickets because the card processing would somehow always be down.

If you've tried to buy a ticket to a sporting event in person recently you might have noticed that they don't even let you use cash anymore.

[FunHearing3443]

Yeah tbf as someone who works in the industry, that sounds more like a ticket brokerage than what Ticketmaster / StubHub etc do (directly). I’ve learned from personal experience that ticket brokers will do some WILD stuff.