Bots Beat Fans: How Garth Brooks, Sam Fender and RAYE Exposed Ticketing's Weak Spot

Garth Brooks cancelled an added Kansas City matinee after a queue of more than 90,000 accounts — most of them, his team said, bots — overwhelmed the sale. Ticketing company AXS and the T-Mobile Center shut it down. Refunds went to the few genuine buyers who got through.

The country star had done everything right. He added an afternoon show to his 'Blame It All on My Roots' tour dates, kept every seat at roughly $155 before taxes, and opened sales. The bots didn't care about the price. They held tickets across the floor and lower seating sections until the show disappeared. The original evening performances survived.

Did the same thing hit Sam Fender?

Days later, yes. Fender was preparing presale tickets for his homecoming concerts at Newcastle's St James' Park on his 2027 'Proper Massive Stadium Tour' when his ticketing provider, Gigantic, detected unusually high suspicious traffic. The website threw errors. Fender postponed the October 28 presale to the following morning.

RAYE hit trouble even earlier in the chain. Her Royal Albert Hall concert — capacity around 5,000 — attracted approximately 1.8 million registrations, including, she said, hundreds of thousands of fraudulent entries created by AI-powered bots. Her team manually reviewed the registrations before distributing purchasing codes. A fairness mechanism had become a screening exercise.

Three artists, three points of failure. The common thread is arithmetic: a fixed number of seats, and resale margins that make automation profitable. A $125 ticket resold at $400, times twenty tickets, is a business. Multiply that across hundreds of events and you've built an industry.

What changed in the arms race?

Scalping predates the internet; it used to require standing outside a theatre. Automated purchasing software changed the scale. A human opens a website, picks a seat, pays. A bot (automated purchasing software) attempts many transactions simultaneously across networks of fake accounts, imitating separate customers.

Platforms answer with virtual waiting rooms, purchase limits, fraud detection and account verification. Each measure leaks. Presale codes get shared. Registration systems attract fake accounts. Waiting rooms get flooded by traffic with no genuine demand behind it.

The legislative front is moving:

• The US BOTS Act (Better Online Ticket Sales Act, 2016) bans circumventing ticket-purchasing controls; the FTC brought its first enforcement cases in 2021.
• Ontario's Ticket Sales Act bans circumvention software; in 2026 the province capped resale at original total price, plus taxes and platform fees.
• The UK government proposed resale restrictions in November 2025: no resale above original cost, capped resale fees, new compliance duties for platforms.

Laws alone won't finish it. Bots operate across borders, with accounts in one jurisdiction and infrastructure in another. Enforcement needs resources, cross-border cooperation and penalties large enough to outweigh the profits.

What would actually fix onsales?

The source analysis points to several levers:

• Verified registration. Confirm an account is a real prospective buyer before the onsale — while not treating a family sharing Wi-Fi as a bot network, and collecting minimal personal data.
• Lottery-style allocation. For the hottest events, a verified registration window followed by randomized purchasing opportunities. No extra seats, but the fastest connection stops deciding everything.
• Face-value resale. Ticketmaster's Face Value Exchange lets fans resell at original purchase price, including fees and taxes. With transfer restrictions, markups shrink and so does the incentive to buy at industrial scale — provided exceptions exist for gifts and changed plans.
• Platform policing. Flag connected payment methods, maximum-allowance purchases and instant mass listing for resale; report suspicious traffic honestly to artists and promoters. A queue of 100,000 "customers" that is mostly automated tells a promoter nothing about real demand.
• Contingency planning. Decide before the emergency who pauses a sale, how existing purchases are protected, and when fans hear about it. Fender's direct communication during the Newcastle delay is the model.

There's an uncomfortable economics point, too. Brooks prices uniformly to keep shows accessible. Artificially low prices plus unrestricted resale hand resellers the difference. The answer isn't raising every price to what the market will bear — it's combining accessible pricing with verified buying and face-value resale rules.

And some honesty helps: a 20,000-seat arena cannot seat 200,000 genuine buyers, whatever the queue suggests. Sometimes demand simply exceeds supply.

Why smaller acts should worry most

If AXS, Gigantic and the teams behind internationally successful artists can be disrupted this badly, the picture for an emerging band with one hometown show is bleak. Small promoters lack the resources to investigate suspicious traffic or rebuild an interrupted sale. Protections can't be a luxury of stadium budgets.

The realistic goal isn't perfection — some resellers hire humans to click manually. It's making abuse harder, dearer and riskier while genuine fans get a fair shot. Brooks added a concert so more people could hear him play. Fender delayed a presale so real supporters could buy tickets. The technology, the source concludes, should serve the people who actually want to be in the room.