Deep within the Paradise Papers, the leaked trove of more than 13 million documents about murky international tax havens, are clues to just how lucrative mass ticket-harvesting can be — and why it must be fought.

That is especially true if the purchases are conducted — as alleged by investigators of one Montreal ticket reseller — on robot automated software systems known as scalper bots. The bots are used to buy tickets en masse, preventing ordinary fans from purchasing them. And they are big business.

According to documents in the Paradise Papers, the Montreal ticket reseller Julien Lavallee, for example, showed impressive revenues for his Quebec numbered company: $6.8 million in North American ticket sales in 2013, and $7.9 million the following year.

Why should we care? Because Lavallee is one of countless ticket resellers buying up seats to everything from Adele concerts in London to the Broadway smash musical The Book of Mormon that came to Toronto three years ago, through what British government investigators allege could only have been done through bots.

The result: fans who want to buy tickets to cultural or sporting events too often end up buying them from resellers at an enormous markup.

Buying tickets through bots and then re-selling them isn’t illegal in Ontario. But it will be once legislation introduced on Oct. 5 by Attorney General Yasir Naqvi is passed at Queen’s Park.

That legislation would not only make buying tickets with bots illegal, it would make it illegal to resell a ticket that was bought through a bot or to even use a ticket bought through a bot.

That means that Lavallee, for example, could not resell tickets bought en masse through a bot to any company operating in Ontario, such as StubHub. That’s a business the Paradise papers indicate he not only does business with, but wants to “partner” with.

As reported by the Star’s Robert Cribb and Marco Chown Oved, the reference in the documents to a partnership amounts to what industry insiders call a bombshell. It could be evidence that the world’s largest ticket-reselling website — which bills itself as a middle-man helping fans share tickets — is facilitating mass-market scalping.

Lavallee’s lawyer says his current Montreal-based company Ticketaria “carries out all its activities in accordance with the laws and rules of the jurisdictions in which it operates and sells.” And StubHub maintains it “has a long history of working with law enforcement to help identify and work toward eliminating any fraudulent or illegal activity on our site.”

That’s good to hear, because it will soon be illegal to resell bot tickets in Ontario, and any company doing so will face penalties and fines.

The Ontario legislation would thwart ticket resellers who use bots in another way. It would place a 50-per-cent markup cap on any ticket that is being resold, hopefully deterring illegal activity because the massive profits will just not be there.

And massive, they are. Naqvi’s legislation, for example, came about after the use of bot technology prevented fans from obtaining tickets to the Tragically Hip’s 2016 farewell tour. After the tour it was revealed that within minutes of going on sale, about 60 per cent of the Hip tickets were listed as sold. Fifty-dollar tickets disappeared from Ticketmaster sites, only to reappear on reseller sites such as StubHub for as much as $5,000.

That is not just an impediment to ordinary fans being able to attend concerts and sporting events; it borders on price-gouging.

The Ontario law should go a long way toward shutting down scalper bots and their operators — not to mention any reseller enablers —in this province. The legislature should pass it.

At the same time, ticket-buyers shouldn’t expect that tickets will suddenly become cheap and easily available.

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The impact of bots is quite likely exaggerated – one survey suggests they account for only a small fraction of tickets. And no Ontario law will have an impact on sales in other provinces, or through international ticket operations.

The reality is that many people are willing to pay a lot more for seats at choice events than the price printed on the ticket. Shutting down bots won’t change that.