Why StubHub and Seatgeek are full of sneaky 'ghost tickets'

World Cup ticket sales are chaos. People are up in arms about FIFA using dynamic pricing. The lottery system to determine who even gets a chance to buy tickets is crazy-making. And if you buy tickets from a platform other than the event organizers, there's no guarantee they actually exist. It's called speculative ticketing, and it's the live event industry's dirty little secret.

The way speculative ticketing works is that sellers list tickets on secondary platforms such as StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid Seats that they don't actually have in their possession. In fact, speculative tickets can wind up listed online before any real tickets are even on sale. Most of the time, the rope-a-dope goes unnoticed by buyers because the seller eventually gets tickets and hands them over, even if they're not the exact ones advertised. The seller makes money off the price differential at which they got the tickets, taking advantage of the fact that ticket prices often drop in the days leading up to an event. Other times, however, unsuspecting buyers find out at the last minute that the tickets they thought they'd secured weeks or months before aren't going to come through. Sure, they get a refund, but they've missed out on other opportunities to gain entry to an event. And if fans have traveled to see a show or game, the thousands of dollars spent on flights, hotels, etc., aren't coming back.

These ghost tickets are everywhere, and there's often no way to know whether you've got one until it's too late.

The day the World Cup ticket lottery opened up, as I sat anxiously in a digital line waiting my turn to enter, my boss sent me a tweet that showed some tickets were already being flipped for nearly $20,000 on StubHub. I was confused. Sure, a small number of tickets have been distributed through specialty deals, like FIFA's "hospitality packages," but those hadn't yet been assigned exact seats, just general locations. Upon further scrutiny, many of the tickets listed were, frankly, baffling. The seats were far away, not the VIP-type that the most special early birds get. Vivid Seats had listings for at least one game in San Francisco that's scheduled to be played in Seattle. And a lot of the tickets were for the back rows of various sections, which is a key tell: Speculators list them so that if and when they do get actual tickets in the section, they can tell the buyer it's an "upgrade" upon delivery.

"A lot of times, the consumer doesn't end up knowing anything was wrong or they were spec'd," says Brian Hess, the executive director of the Sports Fan Coalition, a lobbying group, referring to the industry shorthand for speculative ticketing.

Speculative or ghost tickets are, broadly, a function of the internet age. Before digital tickets, the scalper on the corner was speculating, but he already had the hard ticket in hand. Technology and the proliferation of secondary ticketing platforms make betting on ticket flipping much easier. Wayne Forte, the president of the National Independent Talent Organization, says the move to digital tickets provided "the opportunity to be able to speculate on something that doesn't really exist."

It's hard to get a grasp on how widespread speculative ticketing is, since the arrangement works out the majority of the time, and ticketing platforms claim they have a hard time sussing the activity out. Anecdotally, the practice seems to be on the rise. Bands such as Radiohead and Oasis have warned fans about the risk of buying fake tickets. It was an issue with Taylor Swift's Eras tour. It's caught the attention of the Government Accountability Office, and brokers acknowledge it leaves thousands of people stranded annually.

"There more or less isn't any show ever that doesn't have speculative tickets," says Randy Nichols, an artist manager at Fly South Music Group who's also a board member at NITO. He compares speculative ticketing to arbitrage and short selling in the stock market — brokers sell high and hope they'll be able to buy the tickets low.

Lucas Humble, in Kentucky, still isn't sure what exactly happened with the tickets his wife got him to see the band Something Corporate for his birthday last year. She bought them through Vivid Seats, a secondary market seller, but didn't notice AXS, the primary ticket seller for the show, had an exclusive, nontransferable arrangement for the event. While the venue and ticketer reassured them everything was "probably fine" in the lead-up to the show, they bought backup tickets just in case. They were lucky they did: They got an email from Vivid Seats the day of saying their original tickets were canceled.

"They refunded it quickly. They didn't offer any backup tickets or anything," Humble says.

In a statement, a Vivid Seats spokesperson said the company is "committed to providing the industry's best and safest ticket purchase experience," and if a seller doesn't deliver, it refunds.

Speculative ticketing can spook everyone, including people who bought tickets on the primary market. That's what happened to Jadon Silva, in New York, who noticed the exact Lady Gaga tickets he'd purchased via Ticketmaster presale were listed on SeatGeek for thousands of dollars more than he paid. He panicked, worrying that he'd find someone else in his seats or that Ticketmaster would punish him for appearing to flip his tickets. SeatGeek told him it would look into it, but the seats remained on the platform for days after. "It was definitely nerve-racking to see them there," he says. Ticketmaster reassured him it would be fine. Ultimately, his Gaga experience went off without a hitch.

In a statement to Business Insider, a SeatGeek spokesperson said listing speculative tickets is against its terms and conditions, and it works to remove them when they appear. They noted that the company has advocated for the industry to require specific seat numbers for resale ticket listings so that everyone knows what's what, and so some of the opacity is reduced. Of course, it could already do this on its own.

The proliferation of ghost tickets has grown hand-in-hand with secondary ticket platforms. These sites often rank ahead of primary ticketers in Google searches, thanks to savvy SEO and marketing practices, which can add confusion for fans. The day I was looking for World Cup tickets, StubHub appeared above FIFA's website. They also use marketing and design tricks to give fans a false sense of urgency to grab whatever is available — countdown clocks, alerts saying there are only a handful of tickets left.

I spoke with one man who bought what he thought were World Cup tickets off StubHub in May. In what he describes as "a stupor," he Googled the event, clicked on the first link that came up, and scooped up four tickets for more than $4000, even though the seats were in the nosebleeds. He realized soon after what had probably happened and reached out to his bank to dispute the charge and void the transaction. He posted about it on Reddit as a PSA to others to watch out. "It just really ticked me off," he says.

A FIFA spokesperson said that the most secure way to get World Cup tickets is through fifa.com/tickets and that the soccer organization plans to launch its own official resale website soon.

When I reached out to Ticketmaster to ask why it wasn't selling World Cup tickets yet, a spokesperson told me they believed "all tickets currently listed for sale at this point are speculative tickets that the seller does not actually possess," adding that the company views speculative ticketing as "fundamentally misleading to consumers" and has pushed for it to be outlawed. Ticketmaster has its fair share of problems, but speculative ticketing usually isn't one of them. That's in part because it's so active in the primary market — it has a good idea of what's been sold and to whom. But it also resells tickets from other primary platforms and doesn't often run into speculation issues.

"It's too much reputational damage for them, which tells you immediately it is not too hard," Nichols says.

To say the ticketing industry is complicated would be putting it lightly. Between eye-popping ticket prices and dizzying purchase schemes, the process of seeing a concert or sporting event is exhausting. Addressing speculative ticketing is probably not at the top of anyone's list, but it also seems like it could be a simple enough problem to address — like, just ban it. But that's easier said than done. All of the interested parties say they're against it. The secondary platforms say they don't allow it. Ticketmaster, which operates in both primary and secondary ticketing, says it's the antidote. Artists and fans would much rather not have to worry about it at all. And yet it continues.

Secondary platforms say they're marketplaces, like eBay or Facebook, just connecting buyers and sellers, so they don't know whether they're dealing with someone who has an actual ticket. Many of their sellers have legitimate tickets, but there's not always heavy scrutiny to make sure. And if tickets aren't delivered, buyers get a refund or, if possible, a replacement. In cases when things go awry, secondary sellers generally blame a lack of information. They say that if primary ticketers were more open with their data and sales or just released all their tickets all at once, they could better sniff out speculators.

In a statement to Business Insider, a StubHub spokesperson said some people "do have legitimate access to tickets before the public sale — VIP holdbacks, artists, sponsors — but because the system is so opaque, there's no way to verify what's real and what's not, which is why real transparency in the primary market is so urgently needed."

Still, it's easy to imagine how secondary marketplaces could do more to figure out whether sellers have tickets. After all, they're generally pretty good (though not perfect) at avoiding counterfeits. Peter Faas, a music fan in Atlanta, goes to so many local shows that he's made a hobby out of trying to identify speculation. "It becomes so obvious in some cases," he says. "It just sticks out like a sore thumb."

When speculators are caught on ticketing sites, they're punished. Sellers are fined and can even be barred when they fail to deliver tickets. But that may play into the secondary platforms' favor. They often charge a 200% penalty on the ticket price for failing to deliver a ticket. While the buyer gets back 100% of what they paid, the rest goes to the platform unless it's able to replace the ticket, which it often isn't.

There have been several attempts to fix the mess that is ticketing. On a federal level, the BOTS Act, passed in 2016, and President Donald Trump's March executive order on deceptive practices in ticketing are attempts to clean up the space, but their impact has been limited. The bipartisan TICKET Act, which is making its way through Congress, claims to make a number of fixes to ticketing, including prohibiting speculative ticketing, but critics say it includes some loopholes that would leave consumers exposed. States such as Minnesota and Maryland have passed laws limiting ticket transferability and curbing speculative ticketing, but the state-by-state patchwork is tough to navigate.

Some artists have spoken out on secondary and speculative ticketing, but there's only so much they can do. If you're trying to write music, tour, perform, and live your life, that doesn't leave a lot of time for advocacy.

I reached out to Andrew McMahon, Something Corporate's front man, about the ghost ticket experience of Humble, the band's fan from Kentucky. McMahon, who is an outspoken critic of the secondary markets, tells me that speculative ticketing is "a scam" and that he believes it "should be illegal, along with the majority of secondary market practices."

"The thing to understand is that to fight back against scalpers requires a new strategy nearly every tour," he says. "The power of the secondary market has grown so significantly that as soon as a strategy works to thwart them, they embed themselves further into the machinery of the concert industry, making it nearly impossible for a growing number of fans to buy fairly priced tickets."

Nichols, the artist manager, spends a lot of time thinking about speculative ticketing and the secondary markets. He talks to brokers regularly, who tell him that about 1% of their orders wind up "busted," he says, meaning they can't fulfill them. That means 99% of orders are fulfilled, which is an estimate that Hess, from the Sports Fan Coalition, also provides. How one feels about that is sort of a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty situation: It's a pretty high success rate, but given that tens of millions of tickets are sold each year, that means thousands of failures.

"When you look at an arena of 10,000 people, that's a bunch of people standing outside who couldn't get in," Nichols says.

For fans, speculative ticketing is yet another exhausting hurdle in an already broken system. Between dynamic pricing, bots, lotteries, and now ghost tickets, getting into a show feels like gambling at a casino, not paying a fair price for entertainment. Unfortunately, for now, the only advice is really: buyer beware.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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