Re: North American problem?
Not "only", but vastly skewed to the northern american continent, as the numbers in the article show. A total of 85% of those bots active in the US/Canadian markets is pretty definitive.
Europe is a big place, but here in the Netherlands there simply isn't that much of a problem with this, possibly because it's simply not commercially viable (anymore).
For starters reselling tickets for profit is illegal, and event organisers/ticketing agencies watch this like a hawk. ( past broehaha and Bad Press may have had something to do with this..) Selling for face value or at a discount is allowed, so you can still shift tickets you may have won/got from Boss/Sponsor/Friendly Techie, but getting your hands on a decent amount of tickets, and trying to shift them at a profit is...bothersome.. Easier and more cost-effective to make and shift counterfeit tickets, which is a bigger problem over here than real-ticket privateering. Which again makes shifting real tickets harder, as people have become wary of the secondhand market in this respect.
Another way life gets hard as a ticket-profiteer, is that the way tickets are sold severely limit the amount of tickets you can get your hands on per transaction. Because of the way we use electronic banking over here, and how things are logged in the transaction system, it's nearly impossible to make a purchase from the same bank account twice within at least 15 minutes, usually an hour, for AAA events possibly never. While IP adresses are easily spoofed, bank accounts over here aren't, so you'd have a hard time getting around that, unless you go full criminal and get involved in things that would land you a far more serious slap on the wrist than simple ticket profiteering.
So at least over here the effort and risks far outweigh any possible profit you'd expect to make from what is essentially a low-margin illegal enterprise.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
