The day has finally arrived. Ticket sales for BIGBANG’s Taeyang (태양)’s “The Light Year” concert in Kuala Lumpur officially went live yesterday (Monday, 7 October), and fans have been eagerly anticipating the idol’s performance at the Axiata Arena. Since the announcement, scalpers have been active, promoting their services on social media and encouraging fans to pre-book slots to purchase the singer’s tickets from them when the time comes.
One self-proclaimed scalper even attempted to scam someone by claiming they had already secured passes last month. Speaking of these resellers, there has been a surge in their numbers since the tickets became available. Unlike in previous years, they are operating in a more (somewhat) discreet manner. Here’s what we mean:
In previous years, there have been numerous instances of scalpers reselling tickets at astonishingly high prices on websites such as Viagogo and Carousell. Many of these cases turned out to be scams, leading fans to report them to the concert organisers. This time around, scalpers have not advertised their tickets on these platforms. Instead, they are posting on Twitter, claiming to have secured tickets and encouraging fans to send them a direct message (DM) if they are interested in purchasing.
This strategy helps them avoid drawing too much attention as they did not specify the price. From our observations, this tactic is not limited to Taeyang’s “The Light Year” concert tickets in Kuala Lumpur. Scalpers tend to promote their ticketing services whenever a major show is announced; however, they no longer explicitly mention the exact prices for the tickets they are reselling. Instead, they typically list the seat categories, the number of tickets available, and state that they are reselling at the “original price”, as seen in the screenshots above.
While many of these scalpers are becoming more astute, some have made the mistake of boasting about successfully skipping the online queue to purchase tickets, inadvertently confirming their use of bots to bypass the system. This, of course, led to netizens reporting them to the concert organisers, hoping that their purchases would be cancelled. Some also seized the opportunity to scam fans into “buying” tickets from them but luckily, fans are smart enough to recognise the trickery and expose the scammers.
At the time of writing, there has been no update on what organisers plan to do with these scalpers or fans’ complaints about their website crashing. Let’s hope that actual fans will get their chance to see Taeyang live in concert this December.
