Sweeping Up Tickets and Reselling at Five Times the Price, Some Fetching 1 Million Won... Organized Scalping Rampant in Autumn Baseball

Sweeping Up Tickets with Macro Programs... The Reality of an "Online Scalping Empire"
Suspected Transactions Surge 40-Fold, but Only 5% Face Penalties

As the autumn baseball season begins, online scalping of tickets is once again rampant. With the resale market for popular tickets to sports games and concerts expanding, there are growing concerns that “online scalpers” have effectively become organized, as the top 1% of sellers account for nearly half of all transactions.

Scenes from the second game of the 2025 KBO League postseason playoffs held on the 19th at Daejeon Hanwha Life Insurance Ballpark. Tickets for this game were traded on TicketBay for more than five times the face value. Some tickets were priced at 1 million won each. Photo by Yonhap News Agency

According to data submitted by Democratic Party lawmaker Cho Seungrae, a member of the National Assembly’s Strategy and Finance Committee, based on information from the National Tax Service, the top 1% (441 individuals) of ticket resale platform TicketBay sellers conducted 122,745 transactions last year, accounting for 41.2% of the total. The total transaction amount reached approximately 29.86 billion won, with each person selling an average of 278 tickets and 67 million won worth of tickets annually. Analysts point out that the top 1% are monopolizing nearly half the transactions, indicating that scalping has entered a commercialized phase.

In fact, tickets for the second game of the KBO postseason between Hanwha and Samsung, held on the 19th, were traded on TicketBay for more than five times the face value. Some tickets were priced at 1 million won each.

According to data submitted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to Democratic Party lawmaker Min Hyungbae, suspected cases of online scalping for professional sports events surged from about 6,200 cases in 2020 to approximately 259,300 cases by the end of August 2025, marking a more than 40-fold increase in five years. While the detection rate has improved since the Korea Professional Sports Association’s scalping report center switched to an automated monitoring system in 2025, the rapid increase continues.

Despite this, enforcement remains minimal. Of the scalping reports, only 989 cases (4.6%) out of 21,442 in 2024, and 1,875 cases (5.9%) out of 32,013 in 2025, resulted in actions such as reservation cancellations or warnings.

Using Macros to Sweep Up Tickets... Calls for Harsher Penalties

Scalpers use macro programs to instantly secure tickets from official sales channels, then resell them on C2C (consumer-to-consumer) platforms for huge profits. Although official ticketing sites such as Interpark and Ticketlink have introduced anti-macro technology, scalpers’ methods are evolving rapidly, making it difficult for these companies to keep up.

Under current law, online scalping is only punishable by a fine of up to 200,000 won under the Minor Offenses Act, and penalties are limited to “in-person transactions,” leaving a legal loophole for online resale. Experts argue that stricter penalties are needed to eradicate scalping, and that regulatory reforms should hold platform operators who facilitate or profit from resale transactions accountable as well.