Must hijack, I recently worked for a major web scalper and was expecting to discover OP bought from the secondary market when I clicked(as scalpers purchase official ticketmaster tickets like any consumer and simply resell them) but there's the tm confirm, nice. You guys wouldn't believe how messed up ticket scalpers, or brokers, or secondary market sellers are. Whatever you want to call them they're savvy and they're bad news, making tm look like a non-profit by comparison.
Scalpers pocket the entire face value on an average ticket resale order. That means if you paid 400 including fees for a ticket order, they paid 200 for it including fees. They don't offer any product or service other than manipulating and ripping off their customers, the vast majority of which ignorant to the mere existence of a primary vs. secondary ticket market.
I was a valued asset in what can only be described as, for all intents and purposes, this particular broker's customer retention department. Brokers, through a combination of public ignorance, legal loopholes, and favorable court rulings have managed to legally scam the F*** out of the public.
What they do is list for sale tickets they DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE at inflated prices to virtually every non-sporting event you can imagine in the USA and Canada. They're called "Catagory" ticket listings; it's an intentionally vague label and you're unlikely to find much if any information about this topic through research, they're also referred to as "Zone" listings. When a ticket order cannot be filled to satisfy upper management's viscous profit quotas or the tickets can no longer be obtained(sold out), you guessed it- me and my colleagues on the floor have the duty of reaching out to the customers for the 1/3 of total orders which meet those qualifications and try to manipulate them into accepting alternate seats that will most likely be a worse value than what they originally bought and paid for, per our training. That is even if they were partially refunded in the process. Our phone lines were open all work day and we were regularly interrupted from tasks to answer these returns calls from customers, management attempted to properly distribute these calls between us but it's hard. I'm a decent wordsmith but I simply cannot describe how bad these calls were, literally doing the company's dirty work for what many cashiers start at, did I mention that part?
Want a cancellation and full refund? Just ask- we on the floor of my department don't care despite what we're groomed to believe but management has incentives to retain as many orders as possible because it's fun to play business!(and keep a low profile). See, even if/when our host platform raises our fees due to broker rating, which decreases with each cancelled order, it doesn't matter because our owner also owns the host platform. The reason these broker ratings and fees exist is supposedly to keep the scalpers honest, HA! Not only that, the aforementioned platform consists of thousands of domains, each with the same prominently displayed 1-800 call center number. These trick you into giving up your money by utilizing pay-per-click search engine result services(B2B- you're complicit google!).
The sales goal this year was 22 million, that was just for my department- strictly "Catagory" listing ticket sales, 22 million. The language in the user agreement for most of these platforms will say something along the lines of: "Generally, all ticket listings on SITE are a unique set of tickets from an individual TICKET SELLER. Some ticket listings on SITE may only be representations of available tickets and not actual seat locations or currently available tickets. Occasionally tickets ordered may no longer be available at the price or in the quantity originally ordered at the time the order is received."
You're asking how this is possible? So am I.
PS- http://krqe.com/2015/05/12/online-ticket-scalpers-target-new-mexico-theater-goers/
PPS- I've mentioned scalping practices in this comment that haven't been uncovered by any media outlets to my knowledge. Have fun reddit detectives!