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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…

By Samantha Johnson / July 12, 2026
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.

Boy band Seventeen greets the audience in New Jersey on September 7, 2022. Photo: Pledis Entertainment
Boy band Seventeen greets the audience in New Jersey on September 7, 2022. Photo: Pledis Entertainment

The group allegedly used AI-powered macros to stockpile tickets before ordinary fans could access them.

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