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 The antitrust investigation grew out of a probe by the attorney
general's office into irregularities in the ticketing industry,
which found that ticket brokers were using illegal software programs
to snap up thousands of tickets and reselling them with huge price
markups.
The source familiar with the NFL antitrust probe, who asked not to
be identified because of the non-public nature of the matter, said
it was spurred by a flood of complaints about use of the illegal
software known as ticket bots.
A report released on Wednesday by Schneiderman's office detailed how
the National Football League, and sports teams like the New York
Yankees, implement rules barring sales of tickets below a certain
price level on official sites.
"Price floors may make it impossible to obtain tickets on the
team-promoted Ticket Exchange platform for below face value when
demand decreases," like during games at the end of a sports season
between teams not headed to the playoffs, the report said.
The NFL did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the
antitrust investigation.
A New York Yankees spokesperson said its voluntary program Yankees
Ticket Exchange was set up, in part, because of fraud by principle
entities in the secondary market and added that they wondered why
the report had no mention of where most significant frauds in the
marketplace occurs.
The report also says that excessive service charges for tickets,
"may constitute evidence of abuse of monopoly power, especially as
they relate to the resale of sports tickets."
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Problems in the ticket industry extend beyond sports to popular
concerts and theater productions, the attorney general's office
report said.
Bots, illegal computer programs that automate the process of
searching for and buying tickets to events on ticket vendor
platforms, were used by brokers to purchase large volumes of
tickets, which were later marked up sometimes by more than 1,000
percent to yield easy profits, the attorney general said.
In one example cited by Schneiderman, a single broker bought 1,012
tickets in one minute to a Dec. 8, 2014 concert of the band U2,
despite a claim by the ticket vendor that there was a four-ticket
limit. By the end of the day, that same broker had bought more than
15,000 tickets to U2's shows across North America.
The report recommended imposing criminal penalties for using 'bots'
to buy tickets in bulk and capping the amount ticket resellers can
markup prices.
(Reporting by Mica Rosenberg in New York, Sarah N. Lynch in
Washington DC and Sangameswaran S in Bengaluru; Editing by Noeleen
Walder, Tom Brown and Gopakumar Warrier)
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