Bots buying up Vierdaagse entry tickets to resell at high prices
Entry tickets for the Vierdaagse, the annual four-day marching event around Nijmegen, are always sold out in no time. Sellers on Marktplaats are using bot software to buy up tickets that become available when original buyers change their minds and then resell them for a lot of money, NU.nl reports.
Some 47,000 tickets were available for this year’s Vierdaagse, which starts on July 15, and all have been sold. So people who still want to participate are at the mercy of resale. The Vierdaagse organizers set up their own resale system last year, so resale via other platforms is no longer permitted. But it still happens. NU.nl found advertisements on Marktplaats offering a ticket guarantee.
The sellers use bot software to grab and hold any tickets that become available through the Vierdaagse platform. “Interested buyers share their details with the advertiser, who then automatically checks whether a ticket becomes available,” a spokesperson for Atleta Resale, the company that organizes the official resale for the Vierdaagse, told NU.nl. “Once this is the case, the details are automatically filled in the system, and an iDEAL payment is initiated. The advertiser then first sends the buyer a payment link for his alleged service of 100 euros and then a link to the official site for the Vierdaagse, where you can buy the ticket.”
Atleta Resale says it has taken measures against bots. “But it remains an ongoing battle,” the spokesperson said. “Some bots are becoming increasingly sophisticated and therefore more difficult to distinguish from real users. Nevertheless, based on collected data, we can often determine afterward which tickets were purchased by bots.”
Stichting De 4Daagse is also aware of these types of ads, a spokesperson told the newspaper. “We have made multiple reports to Marktplaats about this advertisement, which is then promptly removed by Marktplaats. We strongly advise against buying tickets via these channels, as this will incur additional costs without any guarantee.”
A spokesperson for the resell platform Marktplaats told NU.nl that it does not allow the resale of Vierdaagse tickets and removes any ads it becomes aware of. “That has happened seven times so far.”
Vierdaagse tickets are in high demand, and thousands of people check the resale platform every day. De 4Daagse advises hopeful participants to check regularly. “We expect that more tickets will be available in a few weeks, which will increase the chance of getting a ticket. Experience from last year shows that, especially in the last weeks of the transfer period, multiple tickets sometimes become available at the same time.”
Last year, over 2,300 Vierdaagse entry tickets were eventually transferred to participants who missed out on the original sale.
