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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Good, Viagogo is a horrible company and has been scaming people in Switzerland as well as all over the world. Also not the first time they lost in court.[1] Basically the Uber of ticket sales, move fast, break laws, make an exit and walk away millionaires. This crap needs to stop.

Viagogo purchases tickets with fake names and addresses to then resells them for a much higher price. This is illegal in Switzerland and probably also in many European countries.

[1] https://www.srf.ch/news/panorama/eintrittskarten-zurueckbeza... (German)

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>Viagogo is a horrible company and has been scaming people in Switzerland as well as all over the world.

I went to a very well-known university (in the US), and they had business courses that literally invited speakers in that had startups that were ticket arbitrage.

I was taken aback that they would be bragging about buying out all the tickets for an event and then charging more for them. Their response is something along the lines of "well first we are getting the 'real WTP' price from the consumer and second we sometimes buyout events that turn out bad and lose money, so it's fair!"

But the whole time it was discussed by professors as if this was a great idea!

"second we sometimes buyout events that turn out bad and lose money, so it's fair!" Interesting, I always wondered why places seem to allow this. I guess this is almost like insurance for the event.

Yes, it is only popular events/artists that complain and even then they don't complain too hard (see the very existence of Ticketmaster).

But this is supposed to be a retail business not wholesale, I am trying very hard to get the professors' point in this debate but I just can't.

Maybe the ticket market is ripe for some structural changes where wholesalers become an integral part of the value chain but I don't seriously think that this is the way to go by competing directly with retail consumers by denying them access to these tickets.

>But this is supposed to be a retail business not wholesale, I am trying very hard to get the professors' point in this debate but I just can't.

You are correct. His point would be along the lines of "There is obviously value surplus left over in the current pricing or else the ticket-reseller would not be able to have a profitable business".

The ethics of competing directly with retail consumers by denying them access to the tickets was not a consideration. Clearly their WTP was higher than the venue's/event's pricing, so they see no problem with this.

At least that was my interpretation of the situation. From a business-person's perspective it all seems reasonable enough. From a consumer's perspective it stinks to high heaven and seems like something that should be illegal.

Some people, willfully or by ignorance, fail to see the difference between wholesale and retail.

Things like this just make me loose all respect for yhese degrees...

Business degrees were about exploiting others since their inception, so they never had any basis for respect whatsoever.

What's more is that for any business degree at my uni, a "Business Ethics" course is required and at upper-levels an "Ethics and Compliance" course is required. However it is focused much more on not ripping off investors or being unintentionally racist or misogynist, and has no focus on, for example, charging a profit-maximizing price for insulin or arbitraging food from poor people, etc.

I don’t approve of it, but this seems like basic capitalist principles to me.

I agree. Pure capitalism has some great benefits for entrepreneurial people, but for a whole society it can have some pretty negative bad effects.

Honestly I've never seen ticket arbitrage as a bad thing. These venues are selling below market price and then people get upset when the obvious thing happens. Essentially they are trying to operate using some sort of private club model where it's first come first served instead of supply and demand driven bidding. Yet they simultaneously want to sell these tickets on the open market. So what did they (and everyone else) expect would happen?

I see ticket scalping as a natural and good outcome. If you want a private club then start a private club but honestly you will still have to deal with members attempting to scalp since you aren't charging market price and our broader economy uses more or less free markets.

I am an artist.

I want my fans to be able to come to my shows.

I sell my tickets at a reasonable price to allow my fans to come.

All the tickets get bought up and resold for prices a large majority of my fans can't afford.

The venue is still full of my fans, but only the wealthy ones, and I have no method to allow my less wealthy fans to be able to come to my shows.

I've also made notably less money that I would have if I sold my tickets at the scalper price.

I am no incentivized to sell at the scalper price permanently removing the ability for my less wealthy fans to attend my show.

I am not claiming that the situation is ideal. Only that it is incredibly naive to expect scalping not to exist and that selling below market price without a plan for how you expect that to work is a genuinely bad idea.

If you want to raffle your tickets off then by all means do that. But you will need a very different system from what we have now. And in order to prevent scalping you will probably need to collect government issued ID or biometric data which would need to be verified on entry to the venue. And the secondary market would have to be totally disallowed, with cancellations involving a refund and the ticket being re-raffled off.

Personally I think that anything short of that is incredibly naive and that you get what you deserve.

> I am no incentivized to sell at the scalper price permanently removing the ability for my less wealthy fans to attend my show.

The only 'fair' alternative to this (even in hypothetical scenario when there are no scalpers, e.g. like it currently is in Japan) are lotteries.

I do hate the lotteries for ticket sales a lot, but I'm obviously biased (while I'm not wealthy by any meaningful standard, I'd be able to pay ~5x of the usual ticket here w/o breaking too much sweat).

>These venues are selling below market price

Well that is one way to look at it. Let me offer you another perspective.

Let's say that I send people to your town to buy up all the bread. All of it! Every brand, every size.

Then I raise the price.

Were the people before charging below market price, or did I just manipulate the market price and raise it?

Now consider that it wasn't bread, but something like insulin or gas. Is that still the "correct" market price or am I forcing it?

That is either an unreasonable or a flawed analogy, depending on exactly what you meant. It is almost never reasonable to use essentials like food when the discussion is about luxuries.

If by bread you meant specifically and only bread, then there is no issue. People will simply do without bread, perhaps buy pasta, you will be out a huge amount of money, things go about how you'd expect. In that case your analogy is flawed because you have not changed the market price. Instead you have lost yourself a lot of money.

If by bread you meant "the food supply in general" then it is an unreasonable analogy. The food supply likely requires legal protections that luxuries don't because lives are at stake. You are able to manipulate it only because people are physically unable to "do without".

>That is either an unreasonable or a flawed analogy, depending on exactly what you meant.

What I meant was not necessarily related to the items I suggested, you can change them for whatever you like. I was addressing your argument about "selling below market price" and illustrating that the market can be manipulated and the natural "market price" be specifically manipulated by arbitrage of the entire available stock of something.

It seems you want to turn the discussion back to specific types of items instead of your original argument. Regarding that I will say that I do not think that manipulating the price of any item (luxury or critical) by acquiring the entire available stock and raising the price is good for the market or for society.

I will say that I do not think that arbitrage of a single item if there is an otherwise existing market and supply of the item is a problem (ie. you can sell your single ticket for whatever you can get), but to clean out the supply and artificially raise it is.

People should be able to sell at the price they want, to who they want. Scalpers always act in bad faith. Most people are capable of good faith, they don’t need laws or the market to limit their behaviour.

There is a legal difference between ticket arbitrage (non regulated, no conyract between the venue and the company doing the arbitrage, in which case it would be a wholesale business and the venue wouodbhave absay in prices, also sometimes illegal) and speculatiob on things like food (regulated futures at official markets following complex sets of rules and contracts between parties). Sure, the latter is morally bad (as implemented, as intended there are some benefits), the former is pure abuse from parties with the means and resources to abuse market mechanisms. In a way, ticket arbitrage is the worst consequence of Dropshipping, and yeah, in a sense it is what unconstraint capitalism gives us. Also, it is illegal in certain countries.

In most countries, this would stop if we started holding C suite personally accountable for criminal actions of their company. If they make the big bucks breaking laws, they should be doing jail time.

Then you'd have to get rid of limited liability companies, I don't want to be defeatist but that's not going to happen. There are some instances where it can be done but usually it's hard and I've never seen it happen with big companies, only obvious frauds like pyramid schemes.

LLC is not a shield for criminal conduct. It protects personal assets of the company owners. [0] Generally speaking in American law such protections disappear if you commit fraud or similar malfeasance. For examples, courts will break contracts including liability limits if a party commmits fraud. (IANAL but I read a lot of contracts in my day job.)

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/llc.asp

The relevant term is "piercing the corporate veil" and it pretty much only happens if someone intentionally and knowingly engages in criminal acts.

> if someone intentionally and knowingly engages in criminal acts.

Can you unintentionally and unknowingly engage in a criminal act?

It's somewhat rare, but yes[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)

It depends. At least in the US your intent is important to most laws but not all laws. In other words, the judge or perhaps a jury will decide the answer to your question.

If LLC owner is breaking laws they should be punished, up to, and including, jail time.

I would understand your anger if it were about speculation on the price of rice or wheat. but about tickets? come on...

Even in the case of food shortage one must ask if speculation does not increase investment and production in the long run.

You can speculate all you want as long as the law allows it but viagogo is actually breaking laws in some countries (faking names and addresses to purchase tickets, misleading customers, not honering refund policies, etc. ) and should either stop doing so or prevent customers in those countries from purchasing tickets.

I thought limited liability was about money, not about jail time.

They're about insulating the owner from debt. The LLC can go bankrupt without ruining the owner.

To my knowledge it also shields you from most criminal parts as you can say "It was the lower downs, not my doing" despite it almost always is policy.

Having the employees is what provides the shield: it becomes harder to prove who exactly, did what.

> and has been scaming people in Switzerland

Same here. We issued a restraint order against Viagogo years ago, but still receive >30% 'automated traffic' during high demand pre-sales, according to Cloudflare.

Even though we put lots and lots of resources into making it as difficult as possible for black markets, it still seems to be a quick and easy way to make some cash.

You piqued my interest and now would love to know more, are you selling ticket yourself for your own events and acting as a ticket selling platform for others?

It's sad to see you have such a big amount of automated traffic, no wonder why it's so hard to get tickets for high demand events as a human when you're competing with this.

Can't go into much detail, sorry. But yes, we sell our own events as well as events for other organizers.

It's ironic that we only found out about the scale of automated traffic after moving to CF. Before, we were just fire fighting the load during peaks, while thinking our infra is the problem.

Is this the fault of viagogo if some people a willing to pay almost any price?

I guess most organiser are angry only because they sold their tickets at too low of a price.

> Viagogo purchases tickets with fake names and addresses to then resells them for a much higher price.

Like corporations buying up all the realestate. Its all just part of an anti-pattern fulled by greed and the lack of laws that weren't put in place due to lobbying. Our Western idea of democracy and capitalism is fucked.

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