Governor Healey’s newly announced “Great Divide Act,” legislation to impose a price cap on resale live event tickets, is well-intentioned. No one thinks tickets to comedy, concert, and sporting events should be as high as they are today. But as someone who spent nearly three decades policing fraud cases as a senior law enforcement official, I can tell you that a hard price cap on resale tickets can very well make the underlying problem worse.
During my time investigating consumer fraud, I found that when a legal, transparent marketplace exists for something people want, most of the fraud dries up on its own. Not because people stop wanting good deals but rather because they stop having to go looking for those deals in places law enforcement can’t see.
Before secondary online ticketing platforms matured, we fielded a steady stream of complaints from fans who’d bought tickets from a stranger outside a venue, a scalper in a parking lot, through a Craigslist ad, or from someone in a Facebook group — and gotten nothing for their money. Counterfeit tickets, duplicated barcodes, no-shows who took the cash and vanished.
Once legitimate resale marketplaces opened — featuring buyer guarantees, verified sellers, and a paper trail that was created — those complaints declined sharply. Fans didn’t stop reselling or buying resale tickets. They just did it somewhere we could see it, and somewhere the platform itself had a financial incentive to police it. With those safeguards in place, the public now has a much stronger recourse, and law enforcement can more easily pursue scammers and fraudsters.
That same dynamic was behind Massachusetts’ marijuana legalization 10 years ago. When voters legalized recreational marijuana in 2016, the argument against it was that it would normalize drug use. What actually happened is that a large share of the market moved out of unregulated, unaccountable street transactions and into licensed dispensaries — sales, product safety, and taxes all above board. In other words, buyers found a legal outlet, and the black market that used to serve them shrank.
Ticket demand for a sold-out Noah Kahan show at Fenway won’t go away because Beacon Hill set a price ceiling. All a price cap would do is make it economically irrational for anyone to resell above that ceiling legally, which would push that transaction back into risky parking lot deals and unverified online listings. Every one of those channels is harder for consumers to vet and harder for investigators to trace than a regulated platform with a name, a business address, and a compliance department.
Today, fraud is rampant. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) estimates that 5% of all transactions are fraudulent. If live event ticket sales are pushed back into parking lot deals and unverified online listings, that percent of fraudulent transactions would surely increase.
In other words, a price cap doesn’t eliminate scalping — it just strips away the accountability, identity verification, and buyer protections that a legal, competitive resale market currently provides. It hands the transaction back to whoever is willing to operate off the books, which is exactly the population least likely to make a buyer whole when something goes wrong.
Affordability is a real problem worth solving. But the way to protect fans from getting ripped off is to keep the deal in a place we can regulate — not to make it illegal and hand it back to the street.
Michael McCall teaches at Stonehill College and Bridgewater State University where he is an Adjunct Professor of Forensic Accounting and White Collar Crime. He is a Board Member and current president of the Boston Chapter of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) and spent over 28 years with the U.S. Government, serving as a Special Agent with the FBI in Boston, working on financial crimes, money laundering, and organized crime.