121 cases involve professional sports, totaling 930 million won

Ministry to crack down on scalping at all fall baseball postseason games

Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Choi Hwi-young speaks at a joint public-private meeting on scalping prevention held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Jongno-gu, Seoul, in August. [Newsis]
Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Choi Hwi-young speaks at a joint public-private meeting on scalping prevention held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Jongno-gu, Seoul, in August. [Newsis]

South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has referred 170 people to investigators on suspicion of selling performance and professional sports tickets above face value or attempting to offload them in bulk.

The Culture Ministry said Wednesday it referred the 170 suspected scalpers to law enforcement on Tuesday, after analyzing scalping reports with the Korea Creative Content Agency and the Korea Sports Promotion Foundation.

Of those referred, 121 cases involve professional sports and 49 involve performances. The suspects are estimated to have attempted to sell a combined 11,032 tickets worth 1.03 billion won ($757,000).

Professional sports accounted for the vast majority, with 10,660 tickets valued at 929.25 million won. In at least one case, a single individual attempted to sell more than 1,000 tickets across multiple listings, with the total value exceeding 100 million won.

About 68 percent of those referred — 115 people — were reported based on listings they posted on Ticketbay, a ticket resale platform.

Amendments to the Performance Act and the National Sports Promotion Act took effect Aug. 28, banning the fraudulent purchase and resale of tickets for performances and sporting events regardless of whether automated purchasing programs were used. Violators can face surcharges of up to 50 times the resale amount.

Since the law took effect, authorities received about 68,000 scalping reports through Thursday — an average of roughly 2,000 a day — representing a roughly 17-fold increase from the same period a year earlier.

The referrals also include four suspected cases of "disguised resales," in which sellers reframed transactions as service fees, handling charges or bundled product sales to circumvent the law. With the professional baseball postseason approaching, the ministry said it will conduct on-site crackdowns on scalping at every fall baseball postseason game in cooperation with police.


yjc@heraldcorp.com