Raye’s 1.8 million sign ups show what AI bots are doing to ticketing, and the resale game that goes with it
British artist Raye has 5,000 seats to fill at London’s Royal Albert Hall on 23 October. Presale registration drew 1.8 million sign ups, and Raye says scalpers used AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations along the way. Her team went through the list by hand to shortlist real fans, pushed the presale back two hours to do it, and the venue’s site then took 5 million access requests with a 45 minute outage. The Royal Albert Hall, which has previously blocked more than 38 million bot requests in a single day, told the BBC the law needs to catch up.
In the UK that is already happening. A draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill would cap resale at face value, cap resale platform fees and stop anyone reselling more tickets than they were allowed to buy.
Bots buying tickets in bulk is nothing new here. TEG said as far back as 2017 that bots could be the majority of traffic on Ticketek during big on sales. The new part is AI generated fake fans at the registration stage, which defeats the one defence artists and venues had left.
It is also worth being clear about who profits. The US Federal Trade Commission’s 2025 lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster alleges that Ticketmaster knowingly let brokers run thousands of accounts to beat ticket limits, then provided the tool, TradeDesk, to relist those tickets on its own resale platform, collecting fees from the broker on the primary sale, the broker again on resale, and the fan who bought the resold ticket. The FTC calls it triple dipping. A 2018 undercover investigation by CBC and the Toronto Star recorded Ticketmaster staff at the time pitching exactly this to brokers. Ticketmaster called the reports untrue at the time, and in October 2025 told US lawmakers it would shut TradeDesk down. The Ticketmaster and Ticketek businesses operating in Australia both run their own resale marketplaces, so the same incentive to let resale volume grow exists here.
We are not saying that is happening here, but the point is this whole ticket buying process is so unregulated that anything is possible.
Australia’s rules are a patchwork. NSW banned ticket bots in 2018 and is still the only state to have done so. Resale caps exist in several states but mostly only for declared major events. There is no national bot offence and no national resale cap, and an offshore scalping operation does not care which state the gig is in.
The ALMBC’s asks to Treasury have not changed since 2024:
- ban dynamic pricing for concerts
- show every fee from the first click
- cap resale at 10 percent above face value
- make scalping illegal at every venue regardless of ownership
- guarantee guest checkout
- and hold ticket funds in trust.
We supported the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Unfair Trading Practices) Bill 2026 in our submission to the House Economics Committee this year. A national bot offence, and a requirement that primary ticketing companies cannot profit from resale above face value on their own platforms, are the obvious next pieces.
The grassroots carries the most risk. A major venue can block tens of millions of bot requests a day. A 300 capacity music venue or an independent promoter running their own ticketing cannot, and they are the ones left with half empty rooms and fans burnt on a resale site.
And the industry as a whole suffers in the long term.
