Sweeping Up 3,000 Tickets and Inflating Prices by 30 Times… Pocketing 400 Million Won Exploiting Fan Love

A group has been arrested by police for illegal ticket scalping, which involved buying up a massive number of admission tickets for popular actors' fan signing events and reselling them at inflated prices up to roughly 30 times their original value.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency's Cyber Investigation Unit announced today that 12 individuals, including a man in his 30s identified as A, were referred without detention to the prosecutors' office last month on charges including violations of the Information and Communications Network Act, the National Sports Promotion Act, the Performance Act, and obstruction of business.

They are accused of disrupting the business of ticketing agencies by using macro programs to purchase a total of 3,069 tickets—ranging from sports games and concerts to fan signing event admissions—between December 2023 and August of this year, and then reselling them at high prices.

Macro programs are unauthorized automated tools equipped with functions such as automatic seat selection, repeated clicking, and the detection of canceled tickets.

Broken down by category, professional baseball tickets accounted for the largest share at 1,496, followed by 1,298 idol concert tickets, 170 musical tickets, 59 fan signing event tickets, and 46 tickets for other sports games.

Investigations revealed that they resold the purchased tickets on online trading platforms at 10 to 30 times their regular retail prices.

In the case of a fan signing event for a popular actor, a ticket bought for 79,000 won was confirmed to have been resold for 2.4 million won.

Police stated that these 12 individuals formed group chat rooms to share methods and profits of their crimes, and engaged in collusion by coordinating appropriate resale prices.

Police have applied for pre-indictment asset confiscation and preservation for 416.57 million won in criminal proceeds generated by the group.

Aside from A and his associates, police are also investigating cases involving the illegal purchase and sale of professional baseball postseason tickets requested by the Korea Sports Promotion Foundation.

Police stated that they plan to continue conducting rigorous investigations through close cooperation with relevant organizations in the future.
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.