$50 Bucks Could Buy You a Ticketmaster Bot for Oasis Tickets — Despite the BOTS Act, Online Botting Is More Prevalent Than Ever

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The Oasis reunion tour dates have fans and scalpers excited—fans want to see a show, while scalpers are ready to make money on the demand. Ticketmaster’s restrictions for ticket sales will do little to combat the botting problem—here’s why.The global online ticketing market size is expected to hit $68 billion by 2025, which means ticket scalpers are making more profit than ever on snapping up lucrative tickets to resell on the secondary market. That’s especially true of events that are considered high-profile, high return on investment events—like an Oasis reunion.

Scalpers score tickets at face value and then resell them for a significant markup, or cause mayhem by hoarding inventory to jack up those secondary ticketing prices. The result for fans is the same—a massively frustrating experience for those who just want to listen to music.

When most people think of bots, they think of sophisticated programmers working behind the scenes with a custom bot designed to bypass Ticketmaster’s bot checks. The reality is that Bots as a Service (BaaS) means you can buy a Ticketmaster bot for as little as $50 that allows you reserve multiple tickets and potentially bypassing household limits.

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Security researcher Antoine Vastel, VP of Research at DataDome says they’ve seen bot developers claim to bypass these checks, resulting in thousands of tickets sold to bots. Earlier this year, ticket touts who conspired to fleece fans of artists including Ed Sheeran, Liam Gallagher, and Lady Gaga, were jailed for operating a ‘fraudulent trading’ scheme worth more than £6.5m ($8.55M). Four touts who fraudulently bought and sold hundreds of tickets through a business called TQ Tickets were sentenced to up to four years in prison in May 2024.These touts used bots as a service, which the National Trading Standards (NTS) e-crime unit in the UK called “multiple deceitful and fraudulent tactics” to acquire tickets from primary sellers. They resold these tickets for up to 500% above the original cost, a practice the NTS says “shamelessly exploited people longing to see their music idols.”

Despite serious jail time for these offenders, bots as a service make it so anyone who is serious about buying more tickets than allowed can bypass those limits. And they’re available online enough that general concertgoers are seeking them out in an effort to fight bots with bots.

In a thread posted on reddit, one person comments: “I’m fucking tired of getting shut out of shows! How do I become a ticket bot? I want to buy as many tickets as possible and fucking give them away so these fuckers take a bath on their cash grab. Fuck AXS, Fuck Ticketbastard. I really miss camping out overnight to buy paper tickets.”