Here’s what Ticketmaster had to say about the big scalper expose

Earlier this week, the Toronto Star and the CBC broke a big story about how Ticketmaster is involved in helping certain clients buy mass amounts of tickets and then automatically post them for resale on secondary sites. (You can read my entire report on that here.)

This, of course, is a total PR nightmare for the company. They had to say something, right? This statement came out through Variety.

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.

It’s gonna take a while to clean up this one. I’ll have more on the subject Sunday with my weekly column at GlobalNews.ca