Smart Event Ticketing: Anti-Scalping & Fair Allocation

Inspiration

High-demand event tickets are often acquired quickly by bots and bulk buyers, making it difficult for genuine users to get tickets at fair prices. This inspired us to build a smarter event ticketing platform that focuses not only on detecting suspicious activity but also on providing fair access to genuine users.

What We Learned

Through this project, we explored ticket scalping, bot detection, behavioural analysis, risk assessment, and fair ticket allocation. We learned how user booking patterns such as request frequency, ticket quantity, timing, repeated attempts, session activity, and purchase history can be used to identify suspicious behaviour.

How We Built It

We designed a full-stack event ticketing platform with user management, event listing, ticket booking, behavioural monitoring, risk assessment, rule-based anti-scalping controls, and fair ticket allocation. Based on the assessed risk level, users can be classified as Low, Medium, or High risk and appropriate access or verification rules can be applied.

Challenges We Faced

One of the major challenges was the lack of a reliable public dataset containing real ticket transactions with confirmed scalping labels. To overcome this, we designed a controlled behavioural-data approach for prototype evaluation. Another challenge was balancing anti-scalping restrictions with fair access, so that genuine users are not unnecessarily blocked.

Impact

Our goal is to reduce suspicious bulk purchasing while improving the chances of genuine users accessing high-demand event tickets through a behaviour-aware and risk-based ticketing process.