How to Prevent Ticket Scalping
Ticket scalping is buying tickets to resell them above face value, usually with bots or bulk accounts. For club nights it looks different from arena shows: a promoter buying out an early bird to flip it, or someone selling screenshots of a ticket to several people. Most of the fixes below are a setting, not a project.
What works
| Setting | Why it works |
|---|---|
| Phone-number accounts | Every slash.fm buyer signs in with a verified mobile number. Bulk accounts are expensive to fake. |
| Max per order | Set 4 on early bird and 2 on anything underpriced. Bots lose their economics. |
| Live codes and App codes only | The app's code changes every 15 seconds. Turn on App codes only and the door refuses the fixed web code too, so screenshots are worthless. |
| Transfers that reissue the ticket | When a ticket is sent, the old code stops working. Stop transfers 1 hour or 1 day before doors on high-demand nights. |
| slash.fm Resale with a price cap | Fans who can't go resell on your event page, within the maximum you set. Resale happens where you can see it, and the buyer's ticket is guaranteed. |
| Small early bird that switches tiers | A capped early bird that rolls into general admission leaves nothing cheap to hoard. |
Tip: Checkout holds tickets for 10 minutes and rate-limits reservations, which blunts the on-sale rush that bots rely on.
What doesn't work
Names on tickets without ID checks are theater. slash.fm tickets aren't issued in a name for this reason: the code, not a name, is what gets checked.
CAPTCHAs at checkout cost you more real sales than they cost scalpers, who solve them for cents. And threatening to void resold tickets only works if you can see resale, which means giving fans a way to resell on the platform.
The honest version
Some resale is demand you underpriced. If early birds are flipping at double, raise general admission, shrink the early bird and keep the money yourself. The goal isn't zero resale; it's that nobody profits from your night more than you do.
Start selling
Sign up with your phone number, create your organization and put in your first event: tickets, guest list and tables. No contract and no monthly fee. New organizers are reviewed before their first event goes live, usually within a day.