Say you got tickets to a show months in advance. It's your favorite band, and while they weren't that expensive or in danger of selling out, you just wanted to scoop them up. Then, two days before the show, something happens, and you can't go. Meanwhile, those $15 tickets are now selling for $50: your group has gotten hot lately. So what can you do?
For most people, the answer is to scalp them. 
While illegal in some states, it's okay to do in others so long as you follow certain restrictions, such as keeping a set distance away from the event whose tickets you're scalping.
But ticket reselling happens on much larger scales. Scalper Gene Hammet thought he was golden after paying for $3 million worth of tickets to the Vancouver Olympics. Unfortunately for him, he bought the tickets from scam artists, and Hammett tried to garner sympathy through the press. Which didn’t quite work the way he might have hoped. At all.
People like these can come together to rip people off on an even larger scale. Wiseguys Tickets created a program to buy tickets from TicketMaster's site in bulk. The program bypassed CAPTCHA (that weird box with squiggly letters and numbers used to verify that a human is performing an online transaction) and allowed scalpers to buy a ton of tickets (over a million starting as early as 2005) and resell them. The scalpers made over $25 million before Wiseguys was indicted.
But even TicketMaster isn't immune to scalping. In what The Boss plainly described as "scalping," TicketMaster redirected customer requests to purchase Bruce Springstein tickets from their regular site to their ticket-reselling site TicketsNow, where they were being sold above retail price. This happened while there were still tickets to be purchased at face value. At the same time, some of the people purchasing tickets from TicketsNow were being sold tickets that TicketMaster didn't even have. That's right: they were being sold "phantom tickets."
The best advice? Buy your tickets legally, and, if you don't need them, sell them the same way.
--Brandon
Brandon, I agree.
It is ok to sell them to a friend if you can't go etc. Hugs Rosalyn
I agree. Everything that's done should be done in good faith. That advice holds for selling and buying tickets as well as most things in life... though it's always safest to follow both the letter and the intent of the law.
:-)
--Brandon
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