Schumer Urges Ticket Sites to Halt Scalping for Benefit Concert

Hundreds of tickets to the 12-12-12 benefit concert to help hurricane victims have turned up for sale on Web sites like StubHub at grossly inflated prices, angering many music fans and prompting Senator Charles E. Schumer to call on ticket marketers to refuse to accept the listings.

On Thursday afternoon Mr. Schumer sent a letter to four major online ticket exchanges, urging them to cease allowing sellers to profit from the demand for the star-studded concert at Madison Square Garden, which was intended to raise money for recovery efforts.

“Every dollar spent for these concert tickets should go to help the victims of Superstorm Sandy, not to line the pockets of unscrupulous scalpers,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement. “Ticket resale Web sites have the opportunity to make it much more difficult for scalpers to make money off this charitable event, and they should seize it.”

Tickets for the event, which features artists including Bruce Springsteen a nd Paul McCartney, sold out within minutes of going on sale on Monday at noon. That day StubHub was flooded with tickets to the show, which will be staged on Wednesday. Even though the face value of the tickets ranged from $150 to $2,500, they have been listed on StubHub for much more. On Thursday afternoon tickets on the floor in front of the stage were listed for as much as $48,000 while those in the upper level were going for between $525 and $3,000.

Stung by criticism from fans who complained on Facebook and Twitter about what seemed to be scalping, StubHub announced earlier this week that it would donate all proceeds from its fees on these sales to the Robin Hood Foundation, which is to distribute the money raised by the concert. By Tuesday afternoon, the site, which makes about 25 percent of each sale, had given more than $300,000 to the charity, said Glenn Lehrman, a spokesman for StubHub.

Mr. Lehrman said the site decided t o allow the sales and give the money to charity on the theory the tickets would be sold in any case through other outlets, including EBay and Craigslist.

“We had a choice,” he said. “We could either not allow ticket sales for the event, or we could allow the ticket sales to be done and we could do the right thing.”

Jacqueline Peterson, a spokeswoman for Ticketmaster, which handled the initial ticket sales, said it was clear that unscrupulous scalpers were using computer programs to snap up tickets for resale. She said programmers at Ticketmaster blocked thousands of sales to computers that they identified as using these programs.

She said Ticketmaster also banned the 12-12-12 tickets from being sold on its in-house resale marketplaces - TicketsNow and Ticket Exchange. “It's a charitable event and profiteering on it isn't what it's about,” she said.

She added that Ticketmaster officials, who have waived the company's normal fees to suppor t the concert, “whole-heartedly applaud Senator Schumer for drawing attention to the disappointing activity on the secondary market.”

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman has also raised concerns about the sales on StubHub. He sent a letter to the company earlier this week asking it to clarify how much of each ticket sale would go to charity.

The concert is being promoted by the executives who head the Madison Square Garden Company, Clear Channel Entertainment Enterprises and the Weinstein Company, the same trio that organized a successful concert after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Sticking to past practice, the producers of the concert have declined to say how many tickets went on sale Monday, how many were sold, or how much money they grossed from that initial sale.

Mr. Lehrman and others in the ticket resale business say arenas and promoters generally do not reveal how many tickets are available in the public offering, because large lots of tickets are often held in reserve for corporate sponsors, artists, managers, talent agents and the space itself. Some of these tickets typically end up being sold at high prices on resale sites as well, he said.

It remains unclear how many tickets were sold Monday and to whom. Also unclear is how many of those were immediately put up on resale sites.

What is clear is that many fans were frustrated, and vented their anger at the scalpers on the concert's Facebook page. “I understand I didn't get the luck of the draw on Ticketmaster,” wrote Bob Malachowski on Monday. “It's not sour grapes about that. It's disgusting how much the price is jacked up on StubHub, eBay, etc. Disgusting. Fine, I didn't get a ticket, I'll live with that. But why should people gouge others for a benefit concert?”

Ellen Fuhrer of Armonk, N.Y., was also unable to get a seat, despite trying for hours. When the tickets went on sale Monday at noon, she was at her computer, credit card in hand, her cursor on Ticketmaster's buy button, hoping to land any seats she could find. But the concert sold out within minutes, and despite several attempts over the Internet and calls to Madison Square Garden's box office, she never got close to getting a seat. During the same period, she saw tickets appear on StubHub for many times their face value.

“We should have an equal opportunity to get a ticket,” Ms. Fuhrer said. “It seems we were all blocked up and if you go to StubHub you see hundreds of tickets available. Something stinks in the state of Denmark.”