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To prevent the resale of popular sports and concert tickets at inflated prices, a so-called "anti-scalping law" went into effect last August. However, as the fall baseball postseason gets underway, illegal ticket transactions exceeding 1 million won are openly taking place.
Reporter Lee Tae-gwon has the details.
[Reporter]
Professional baseball playoff tickets are in such high demand that 66,000 seats were sold out across the first three games.
With competition for reservations fierce, scalpers are still a fixture at the venues.
Some baseball fans who failed to secure tickets head to theaters broadcasting the games live to soothe their disappointment.
[Seo Ji-woo and Bae Sin-cheol / Gwanak-gu, Seoul: Scalpers snap everything up in advance, so no matter how much you love baseball, the reality is it is not easy to watch games at those prices.]
Despite crackdowns, ticket scalping remained rampant, prompting the enforcement of a strengthened "anti-scalping law" starting last August.
Even if tickets are not purchased using macros for "habitual or commercial" purposes, anyone reselling tickets above the purchase price faces fines of up to 50 times the face value, and ticketing platforms are also held partially accountable.
Yet, on ticket brokerage sites, table seats originally priced at 90,000 won are being sold for hundreds of thousands of won, with some listings asking as high as 1.65 million won.
When inquiring with a seller on a second-hand trading app asking 800,000 won for two tickets originally priced at 95,000 won each, the response comes back, "I have to get at least 550,000 won."
Critics point out that this persists because the criteria for determining "habitual" and "commercial" practices under the anti-scalping law are ambiguous, and trading platforms lack sufficient incentives to actively monitor fraudulent sellers.
[Chang Hyo-gang / Attorney (Ihwa Law Firm): If they borrow names from multiple people or operate multiple accounts, actually bringing them to punishment is extremely difficult.]
Experts suggest that clear enforcement standards must be established, and overseas cases—such as permitting ticket transfers and resales exclusively through official platforms hosted by event organizers—should also be considered.
(Video reporting: Kim Se-kyung | Video editing: Park Na-young | VJ: Kim Hyung-jin | Design: Han Heung-su and Kim Ye-ji)
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