The war on ticket bots is unlikely to be won.

Why are there so many empty seats in Chepauk despite tickets being sold out online?

That, my friends, is an M. A. Chidambara Ragasiyam.

The demand for IPL’s El-Classico CSK vs MI was exceptionally high. But this is not the only reason tickets were so scarce.

Scalping used to be about burly men lurking outside stadiums with fistfuls of tickets. Cries of “tickets here! tickets here!” still ring out before the toss. But the internet has created a larger and more efficient market beating the traditional scalpers, buying up tickets and selling them for a substantial markup.

Every time the franchise releases a new block to sell, they immediately get snapped up by “ticket bots”, high-speed ticket-buying software. The bots cut the virtual queue, manipulating and paralyzing sites like PayTM Insider before real people can get a look-see.

A ticket bot, also known as a “scalper bot”, is software that’s designed to help purchase tickets by performing automated tasks like scraping pricing details, checking inventory for newly released seats, or purchasing and reselling tickets.

Ticket bots typically imitate the behavior of human users, only faster and in larger volumes. This means these scalper bots can unfairly find and purchase tickets in ways human customers can’t.

Bots are a massive problem in the ticketing world, making up almost 40% of all ticketing website traffic. They’re one of the main reasons you can’t get tickets to see your favorite artists, sporting teams, or live events.

Ticket brokers everywhere use botnets to grab hundreds of seats intended for fans. So consumers are missing the chance to get the best tickets when they first go on sale, and they’re often paying more for inferior seats on the deceptive websites used by some brokers.

Too many tickets end up on secondary market websites for substantially inflated prices.