News

Ticket Anti-Fraud Technology

• 6th Sep 2017

It’s not uncommon to find tickets for sporting, theatrical and music events being for extortionate prices either via secondary retailers and websites or ticket touts but the time of massively inflated ticket prices may be coming to an end. This is being made possible using blockchain technology, the same technology that is behind some increasingly popular cryptocurrencies such as bitcoins.

Ticket Fraud
According to the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers (STAR) over 21,000 people during the last three years reported being affected by ticket fraud and over £17 million has been lost to ticket fraud over the same period. 48.1% of reported ticket fraud is by women and 59.1 of ticket fraud is reported by men (most men in their 20s). Action fraud also reported that 64.6% of these tickets were also purchased via direct bank transfer. The good news is that issues surrounding ticket sales are being addressed. Recently has been passed that aims to prevent automated programs (known as bots) to bulk buy tickets from legitimate sellers so that they can then be resold at massively inflated prices. For example, face-value tickets for Ed Sheeran and Adele tickets were sold out in minutes upon release and then made later available for thousands of pounds on resale websites.

Primary ticket sellers are also being urged to increase their own efforts to prevent the use of bots to harvest tickets and some such as Citizen Ticket are going one step further by using blockchain technology. The same technology that is behind the increasingly popular bitcoin cryptocurrency that is becoming more widely used in iGaming (with some online sites using only bitcoins) and some retailers both on line and on the high street are starting to accept Bitcoins. Bitcoin related transactions in online gaming and elsewhere are made more secure thanks to the use of blockchain technology because the blockchain itself keeps a record of every transaction or change it goes through.

“A vast, globally distributed ledger where anyone, anywhere can move, store and manage any kind of asset, from money and securities to intellectual property and votes.”

– Alex Tapscott, co-author of Blockchain Revolution

Blockchain technology itself is relatively new and somewhat in its infancy (in the same way that the internet was in the 90s) but promises greater security and peace of mind when it comes to making transactions. At the time of writing the blockchain based currency bitcoin is also accepted by big companies such as Microsoft and Dell, some video games can be purchased using bitcoins and in Canada some high street retailers and restaurants are now accepting bitcoins too.

There are even bitcoin ATMs where you can purchase and exchange bitcoins for the local currency wherever you are. Blockchain technology can be expected to branch out from currency, so that we’re soon expected to have “bitTickets” as well giving us the security and knowledge that we are paying the right price for the ticketed event and that we have a genuine ticket, whether we’re buying with bitcoins or other currencies.