Ticketmaster has launched an internal review of its ticket reseller accounts and employee practices to ensure that scalpers who use bots to circumvent purchase limits aren’t using Ticketmaster’s resale software.

The announcement came the day after the Star and CBC published an undercover investigation in which Ticketmaster employees told journalists posing as scalpers that the company turns a blind eye to how resellers acquire tickets.

“We do not condone the statements made by the employee as the conduct described clearly violates our terms of service,” read a Ticketmaster statement published in Variety magazine.

“Ticketmaster’s Seller Code of Conduct specifically prohibits resellers from purchasing tickets that exceed the posted ticket limit for an event. In addition, our policy also prohibits the creation of fictitious user accounts for the purpose of circumventing ticket limit detection in order to amass tickets intended for resale,” the statement read.

Star and CBC reporters were told by two Ticketmaster employees on two different occasions that scalpers who use the company’s Trade Desk software will not be scrutinized, even if they have far more tickets than the ticket limit allows.

Trade Desk software allows scalpers to synchronize multiple Ticketmaster accounts, each with a different name and credit card number — a common method used to access tickets beyond the limit.

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“I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred Ticketmaster accounts,” said one Ticketmaster salesperson at the Ticket Summit 2018, a conference for scalpers held in Las Vegas this July. “They have to because if you want to get a good show and the ticket limit is six or eight (seats), you’re not going to make a living on eight tickets.”

“We don’t spend any time looking at your Ticketmaster.com account. I don’t care what you buy. It doesn’t matter to me,” said the Trade Desk salesperson.

Toronto Star and CBC reporters went undercover at Ticketmaster’s Las Vegas Ticket Summit in July. They found that the company works with scalpers who sell hundreds of thousands of tickets every year — in direct violation of its own terms of use.

In March, CBC and Star reporters downloaded a copy of Trade Desk and were offered a live tutorial via video conference with a Ticketmaster employee.

“We’ve spent millions of dollars on this tool, so the last thing we’d want to do is, you know, get brokers caught up to where they can’t sell inventory with us,” the Ticketmaster employee said. “We’re not trying to build a better mousetrap. I think the last thing we want to do is impair your ability to sell inventory. That’s our whole goal here on the resale side of the business.”

The Star/CBC report has ignited fierce public reaction in Canada and the United States, where it has been picked up by Rolling Stone Magazine and CBS News.

Ticketmaster, which has a virtual monopoly on box office sales for sports and live music events in North America and the U.K. has long denounced scalpers, especially those who use bots to harvest thousands of tickets in seconds, making it much harder for fans to get tickets at face value.

Prior to publication of the report, the Star and CBC send a list of questions to Ticketmaster detailing the investigation’s findings. Ticketmaster declined to address any of the allegations directly, and instead sent a general statement by email.

Ticketmaster’s Thursday statement in Variety says the review began before publication of the investigation.

“The company had already begun an internal review of our professional reseller accounts and employee practices to ensure that our policies are being upheld by all stakeholders. Moving forward we will be putting additional measures in place to proactively monitor for this type of inappropriate activity.”

Ticketmaster’s full statement to the Star and CBC:

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It is categorically untrue that Ticketmaster has any program in place to enable resellers to acquire large volumes of tickets at the expense of consumers.

Ticketmaster’s Seller Code of Conduct specifically prohibits resellers from purchasing tickets that exceed the posted ticket limit for an event. In addition, our policy also prohibits the creation of fictitious user accounts for the purpose of circumventing ticket limit detection in order to amass tickets intended for resale.

A recent CBC story found that an employee of Ticketmaster’s resale division acknowledged being aware of some resellers having as many as 200 TradeDesk accounts for this purpose (TradeDesk is Ticketmaster’s professional reseller product that allows resellers to validate and distribute tickets to multiple marketplaces). We do not condone the statements made by the employee as the conduct described clearly violates our terms of service.

The company had already begun an internal review of our professional reseller accounts and employee practices to ensure that our policies are being upheld by all stakeholders. Moving forward we will be putting additional measures in place to proactively monitor for this type of inappropriate activity.