Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | October 13, 2026
Scalpers suck. Everyone hates them. Herpes has a higher approval rating than scalpers. It’s aggravating to go shopping for something and see the items sold out because they’re now on eBay for five times the price. Concert scalpers are a special kind of awful. How could they get any worse? Add AI, of course!
Singer Raye is planning a one-off performance at the Royal Albert Hall, a legendary concert space in London that usually houses the annual BBC Proms. It’s a 5,000 seater that’s perfect for her brand of maximalist retro pop. Eager to avoid scalpers exploiting the system, Raye set up a sign-up list she hoped would alleviate the problem. People would register and then be manually reviewed to ensure the “real fans” got their seats. But of course AI swamped the system.
On Instagram, Raye said “our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations.” “It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale,” she added. “I’m not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes. Me and my team are going to think really hard about what we can do in the future.”
The fans manually selected who are hopefully not AI bots will receive a pre-sale link and code today, and the remaining tickets would be available to all on general sale.
This is, alas, a growing problem, and one artists have been calling out for months now. In the UK, musicians like Coldplay and Dua Lipa called on the government to protect fans from the growing strength of scalpers. It’s already expensive enough to go to a concert when you get tickets through legit means, but this is really adding salt in the wound, right? The UK government is mercifully taking steps to ban the resale of tickets for live events above face value., but a draft of the bill has been languishing in parliament for months with no progress. The law needs to catch up with the scale and evolution of the scalping business, especially as the big plagiarism machine finds new ways to screw over fans.
Wasn’t this technology supposed to cure cancer or something? Sam Altman, I hope you spend your days walking barefoot across Lego bricks.
