As year-end concerts and autumn baseball fever collide, ticket scalping surges across K-pop concerts and sports events.

Ticket scalping has surged again as year-end major concerts and autumn baseball fever collide. Reports of tickets fetching inflated prices, including an 11,000-won ticket sold for 6.5 million won, have come to light, bringing the so-called “ticket scalping war” under the glare of the National Assembly audit. Lawmakers from both major parties say it is difficult to obtain tickets by normal means and point to structural problems in the resale market.

Recently, ticket scalping has surged at K-pop concerts and the post-season of professional baseball. NCT Wish Concert VIP seats, with a face value of 19,800 won, have been seen at around 8,000,000 won; Seventeen concert with a face value of 11,000 won has reached around 6,500,000 won. Tickets for Im Young-woong and BTS Jin performances likewise trade at tens to hundreds of thousands of won above face value, with 150,000–190,000 won ranges.

Ticket scalping is active not only on resale platforms like TicketBay but also on second-hand marketplaces and social media. Police investigations found a man in his 40s who used a macro program to purchase about 18,800 pro baseball tickets and sold them at up to 15 times their face value, earning over 300 million won. The top 1% of TicketBay sellers accounted for 41.2% of transactions, with total sales of about 29.8 billion won. Reports of ticket scalping in live performances have risen from 359 cases in 2020 to 2,224 last year. The concentration in the resale market has deepened.

However, the problem is that the current system does not curb this effectively. The 1973 Criminal Fine Act imposes up to 200,000 won fines for on-site scalping, but does not apply to online transactions. Proposals include integrating legitimate resale into the market with price caps and disclosure, broker registration requirements. The Swift Law in Minnesota restricts the resale of identical tickets to one per show and requires price disclosure. Domestically, a “Ticket Resale Special Act” and constant monitoring, and platform accountability are urged. Experts say that given the nature of demand and supply in the arena of concerts and sports, scalping cannot be eliminated entirely; what matters is consumer protection and a fair trading framework, and systematic improvements to increase market transparency are urgently needed.