The steps The Cure has taken have not stopped dedicated scalpers, however. Scalpers are simply buying and selling entire Ticketmaster accounts to sidestep the restrictions. Ticketmaster, meanwhile, has been getting hammered by fans and the band for the fees it has been charging for the tour.Hacked, stolen, or dummy (but phone-verified) accounts without Cure tickets are being sold to ticket brokers through a variety of services and forums. Those accounts, in the hands of brokers, can then be used to bypass protections designed to prevent brokers from buying tickets in the first place. Once brokers have bought the tickets (or obtained presale codes to buy tickets), the accounts themselves can then be resold with the tickets in the account to bypass restrictions on selling or transferring tickets (at typical scalping prices). Scalpers have been using stolen and hacked accounts to buy and resell tickets before The Cure asked for these recent anti-scalping protections, while selling entire Ticketmaster accounts which contain tickets scalpers wouldn’t be able to resell otherwise appears to be a new method introduced specifically for The Cure’s tour. Neither practice, however, is widely known to the general public.Do you know anything about Ticketmaster's interactions with scalpers or the underground scalping economy? Contact Jason Koebler at jason.koebler@vice.com or securely on Signal at 202-505-1702.
Bypassing 'Verified Fan' with 'Aged Accounts'
Another listing is selling accounts that have been guaranteed to have previously purchased tickets from Verified Fan presales in the past, presumably. These accounts are more than twice as expensive as other accounts for sale on the site: “These accounts have used to purchase tickets which accounts selected for Ticketmaster Verified Fan Presales from 2018,” the listing says. “Please note that some accounts does not have any past order records as TM keeps events only within past 90 days. But we guarantee all these accounts were used to purchased most of the VF Presale Tickets over the past few years.”“Creating Ticketmaster accounts has become so hard these days. We provide bulk clean & phone verified Ticketmaster accounts for ticket brokers,” the advertisement states. “All Accounts have been created with unique USA residential proxies. Unique password for each account. Will be creating accounts on your own catchall emails/gmails/hotmails/yahoos. We have not added billing info as you have to add your own credit + billing info.”
“Option 1: You can provide us the emails list that you want the accounts to be created & we need access to those emails to verify accounts.
Option 2: You can provide us a catchall domain email access, & we will be crating accounts on your catchall emails ( RECOMENDED & EASIEST)”