Notoriously dodgy ticket sellers Ticketmaster have just been unearthed with their own ticket scalping racket ripping of concert-goers.

An undercover investigation undertaken by CBC News and the Toronto Star has discovered some shady practices going on at Ticketmaster. The ticket selling site has often come under fire for it’s unreasonably large extra charges on ticket sales but the real enemy has always been ticket scalpers. It turns out that Ticketmaster are scalping and touting their own tickets, the investigation has revealed.

Both publications reportedly sent two reporters undercover to Ticket Summit 2018, a convention of ticketing and live entertainment taking place in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The journalists were apparently pitched a professional ticket reselling program by company representatives from Ticketmaster. The reps said that their resale division “turns a blind eye to scalpers who use ticket-buying bots and fake identities to snatch up tickets and then resell them on the site for inflated prices”.

The resale tickets have extra fees which Ticketmaster profits from, it’s like they’re selling the same ticket twice. One of the sales representatives, caught on hidden camera, said: “I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred accounts. It’s not something that we look at or report.” It’s a shady move from the company after less than ten years ago their CEO-at-the-time, Irving Azoff said: “I believe that scalping and resales should be illegal.”

A representative for the website got in contact with CBC after the report broke saying that it is “categorically untrue that Ticketmaster has any program in place to enable resellers to acquire large volumes of tickets”. They continued to say that before the report was released they had already begun an internal review of professional reseller accounts and employee practices.

Ticket scalpers are pricing up the cost of tickets constantly and pricing many people out of seeing their favourite artists. If this is true, Ticketmaster have a lot of work to do to gain concert-goers trust again – that’s if people trusted them in the first place.