South Korean ticket touts to face the music when new penalties come into play

For many K-pop fans in South Korea, the hunt for concert tickets has turned into a high-stakes battle, one where logging on early is no longer enough and ordinary fans find themselves outmatched by organised resellers, bots and shadowy workarounds that can send prices soaring far beyond face value. Previous solutions have failed to rein in the problem, but the government is hoping that the threat of massive fines may finally free ticket seekers from the grips of predatory scalpers. From August 28, amendments to the National Sports Promotion Act and Performance Act will allow authorities to impose penalties of up to 50 times the resale price of a ticket, a sharp escalation from the maximum fine of 10 million won (US$6,600) introduced under laws that took effect in March 2024. Earlier efforts to curb scalping focused largely on “macro” programmes – software tools that can click through ticketing pages and buy seats faster than any human user. But recent cases show the problem has moved beyond simple bot-buying and into more elaborate attempts to game systems that require a verified identity. In March, police arrested 16 members of a scalping ring accused of reselling more than 33,000 tickets for about 190 concerts between October 2022 and the end of 2025, generating 7.1 billion won (US$4.7 million) in illegal profits. The group allegedly used AI-powered macros to stockpile tickets before ordinary fans could access them. Investigators said the gang also used a technique known as “holding transfer”: they released the tickets they had reserved late at night, when fewer people were online, and instantly repurchased them through buyers’ own accounts using automated tools. That allowed the tickets to appear under the individual buyers’ names, helping resellers bypass real-name verification checks. The group also allegedly built fake webpages mimicking Government24, South Korea’s official online public-services portal, to display false mobile ID cards and pass on-site identity checks at venues. Tickets were resold at huge mark-ups, including one with a face value of 200,000 won (US$152) that sold for 5 million won – 25 times the original price. One gang member alone secured 126 tickets for a single concert, according to police. The problem is not limited to K-pop. In June, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism referred 15 alleged scalpers to police after tracking suspected bulk resale activity between January and June, according to Yonhap News Agency. One seller moved 110 professional baseball tickets during that period. Another resold a ticket for a Seoul concert by S.Coups and Mingyu – two members of the K-pop boy band Seventeen – for 1.2 million won, more than eight times its face value. Out of options For Ren Renle, a 28-year-old Chinese graduate student at Korea University, the March case sounded familiar. In early 2022, she paid 30,000 won for an official fan club membership for boy band NCT Dream, hoping it would give her priority access to tickets for the group’s July 29 concert in Seoul. Fan club presales are meant to reward members with an early chance to buy tickets, but Ren still came away empty-handed. When tickets opened to the general public, she tried again, this time going to a PC cafe in the hope that its faster internet connection would help. “I still failed to get a ticket,” she said. Ren then turned to a scalper introduced by other fans and contacted him through WeChat. The scalper asked for her ticketing website username and password, telling her the ticket would be secured through holding transfer – the same workaround later described in the March police case. Ren paid the face value of about 100,000 won, plus a 1,600 yuan (US$235) service fee via Alipay. The mobile wallet is operated by Ant Group, an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post. The concert was cancelled due to Covid-19 but the scalper refunded only the ticket’s face value. “I lost 1,600 yuan in service fees with no way to get it back,” she said. Despite the loss, Ren said she would still consider using scalpers again if official channels failed. “If Korea cracks down harder, I might have to pay even more,” she said. Ren’s dilemma points to the central challenge facing South Korean authorities: tougher penalties may deter organised scalpers, but they do not automatically give desperate fans a safe way to buy tickets once official channels sell out. Lee Hong-joo, a professor of consumer economics at Sookmyung Women’s University, said stricter enforcement could push scalpers onto private messaging apps such as Telegram or overseas resale platforms, making fraud harder to track. “The real solution is not an outright ban on resale but creating official platforms where fans can transfer tickets at face value with ID verification and dispute resolution,” he said. Gambling with strangers Organised scalping damaged South Korea’s “fan economy” and cultural soft-power exports by undermining trust in fair access to performances, said Kwon Byeong-ung, an arts management professor at Chung-Ang University. “If fans cannot trust the ticketing system, it damages the entire cultural export model that South Korea has built,” Kwon said. South Korea’s approach is among the toughest in the region, especially because the incoming penalties scale with resale price. Japan has introduced imprisonment of up to one year to combat scalping, but its fixed fine of 10 million yen (US$66,000) lacks South Korea’s economic deterrent. In Hong Kong, the maximum fine for scalping is HK$2,000 (US$255), though venues used for large-scale performances are generally government-managed and exempt from the law. Kate Wong, a 20-year-old university student, bought a ticket to the 2025 MAMA Awards, one of K-pop’s biggest annual music awards shows, on Carousell for HK$1,200 – nearly 50 per cent above the HK$800 face value – after failing to secure one through official channels. The two-day awards show was held at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Stadium in November, marking its return to the city after seven years. “I was very worried about being scammed. Even though I insisted on meeting face-to-face, I was still afraid it might be a fake ticket,” she said. “I didn’t even know it was illegal. Many of my friends buy from scalpers, some even from mainland Chinese platforms. It feels normal.” She said Hong Kong should introduce stricter enforcement to ensure tickets reach genuine fans rather than scalpers. But she also said heavier penalties alone were not sufficient. “What fans really need is a safe, regulated resale platform. Right now, we have no other choice but to gamble with strangers.”

South Korean ticket touts to face the music when new penalties come into play

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}From August 28, authorities can impose fines of up to 50 times the resale price of a ticket, a sharp rise from the current US$6,600 maximum

From August 28, authorities can impose fines of up to 50 times the resale price of a ticket, a sharp rise from the current US$6,600 maximum