Last Game at Jamsil, But Scalped Tickets Hit 15 Times Face Value: Fans Left Frustrated

[Anchor]

Seoul's Jamsil Baseball Stadium is set to fade into history after this professional baseball season. As a result, even greater attention is focused on the final Jamsil Derby match between the Doosan Bears and the LG Twins scheduled for next week. However, fans are feeling utterly frustrated as scalped tickets for this game are being traded at up to 15 times their original price.

Reporter Jeong Jiyeon has the story.

[Reporter]

Opening alongside the launch of professional baseball in 1982, Seoul's Jamsil Baseball Stadium will be demolished in December, leaving behind 45 years of memories.

Scheduled to be reborn as a dome stadium in 2032, attention is gathering on the final regular-season home matchup between Doosan and LG, slated for the 7th, particularly among the two teams' home fans.

Ticket reservation competition, which began at 11:00 AM on September 30, was far fiercer than usual.

[Baseball Fan: Usually, I often get in around the 4,000th place in line, but even though I got in around the 3,000th place this time, I failed to get tickets, which is disappointing.]

What left baseball fans who failed to secure tickets even more disheartened were the scalped tickets that flooded ticket-trading platforms right after reservations opened.

Dozens of sales posts went up in less than an hour, and seats in the Orange Zone near the cheering section commanded premiums reaching up to 15 times the original price of 18,000 won.

Reports of online scalping in professional sports are increasing rapidly every year.

Last year, reports surpassed 40,000, surging more than fivefold over a span of three years.

Recently, workaround tricks have also emerged, such as selling a baseball player's photo for hundreds of thousands of won and offering a game ticket as a "free gift."

[Baseball Fan: There seems to be an unusually high number of scalped tickets on special occasions. This is the last year for Jamsil Stadium. I wanted to watch the final game together....]

With ticket scalping on the rise, a strengthened law implemented in August has placed obligations on ticket-trading platforms to establish preventive systems.

While platforms state that they are "fulfilling measures in accordance with the law through monitoring of abnormal and repetitive transactions," they appeal to realistic limitations, stating that they "do not have the authority to determine whether a ticket is being scalped."

There are growing calls to urgently supplement systems to block increasingly sophisticated ticket scalping so that tickets can be properly sold to genuine spectators.

Reported by Jeong Jiyeon | Video by Park Chunbae | VJ: Lee Junyoung | Graphics: Choi Jae-young, Seo Seung-hyun
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.