Etix Stops Ticket Scalping Without Slowing Down Real Fans

Etix is the largest independent ticketing platform in North America, powering ticket sales for thousands of venues. As a B2B2C software provider, they manage the complete ticketing experience for their clients. High-demand on-sales make them a prime target for scraping, ticket scalping, and payment fraud. Etix recently deployed DataDome’s real-time bot and fraud protection, and now blocks nearly a third of total traffic identified as malicious (including card testing, bots holding tickets in cart without purchasing, or scalper bots buying as many tickets as possible); all while keeping the purchase journeys of real fans seamless, and freeing Etix engineering from manual, reactive investigations.

The challenge: Beating inventory hoarding and scraping for a streamlined ticket-purchasing process

As a seasoned ticketing platform, Etix knew the ropes. Highly sought-after ticket sales—whether for stand-up clubs, performing arts centers, concert venues, or theaters— naturally attract scalpers and fraudsters. The Etix team had spent years building an in-house suite of defenses, including automated and manual tools to flag and block fraudulent traffic. They engineered a virtual waiting room that assigned ticket buyers an order number before entering the purchase flow, a smart initiative to manage surges and reduce the advantage bots held over real fans. This worked for many years, but as technology has evolved, so has the threat landscape, necessitating a more robust tool to combat fraud.

“As fraudsters and bad actors get more intelligent and use automation and AI to hit our site, it was in our best interest to try something that was not homegrown,” explains Chris Battaglino, Chief Product Officer at Etix.

Threats grew in volume and sophistication as bots scraped prices to identify the most profitable events to scalp, hoard inventory to create an artificial shortage, and test stolen cards.

In the ticketing industry, the consequences can go far beyond simply overloading the infrastructure. When bots tie up inventory, events can appear sold out even though seats remain empty, which is frustrating for genuine fans who can’t get tickets. Furthermore, this distorts the platform’s analytics and can even affect artists’ settlement calculations (which are based on tickets actually sold rather than on displayed availability). The damage ripples across the entire ecosystem: The venue, the artist, and the customer all pay the price.

“The work was becoming overwhelming and felt like treading water. We were maintaining, and we did have some positive results with our tools, but it’s a matter of staying ahead rather than staying on par with what’s out there,” Chris recalls. “We needed to step up and partner with someone who knows what they’re doing at scale.”

The solution: Real-time protection, fast deployment, & close partnership

When Etix began evaluating bot protection vendors, DataDome stood out as particularly proactive, responsive, well-versed in traffic patterns specific to ticketing, and genuinely committed to making the partnership a success.

“DataDome made us feel very welcome and treated us like a partner right from the start,” explains Chris.

After a successful proof of concept, onboarding proceeded quickly and DataDome moved the process forward seamlessly.

Prior to using DataDome, Etix had limited insight into the true nature of their traffic: how much was human, how much was automated, and what patterns the bad actors were using. From the moment the solution went live, that changed. The data was clear and actionable, giving the team a new level of understanding of their traffic.

That visibility was operational through the DataDome dashboard, which quickly became a tool at every level of the organization. For Etix engineers, it’s a daily resource for live monitoring and anomaly detection. For Chris himself, it serves a different but equally important purpose: making the investment easier to justify to leadership.

“It’s really important for me, on the product side, to be able to report this back to our leadership,” he says. “Once a month I use the dashboard to share insights with them and assure them that the investment is paying off.”

The results: 30% of total traffic identified as malicious and blocked

Just a few weeks after it went live, DataDome identified and blocked nearly 30% of Etix’s total traffic as malicious, with scraping accounting for roughly 70% of detected threats and payment fraud for about 26%. Equally important, legitimate traffic remained at around 68%, confirming what the team needed to know: real fans could access tickets without any unnecessary friction.

The false positive rate is one of the most important metrics for Etix. With DataDome in place, fewer than 0.5% of real users were blocked, giving Chris and his team a high level of confidence to allow DataDome to do its job without verifying every decision. This rate continues to drop as the system learns to recognize fan purchase patterns.

The shift also had an impact at the operational level, as engineers no longer have to drop what they’re doing to manually investigate suspicious activity. Reactive management has given way to a proactive approach. “Day to day, the people involved will tell you it’s fantastic to save an hour or two of that time, and to no longer have to intervene and switch contexts every time an incident occurs.”

Chris has certainly gained peace of mind, but he’s still clear-eyed about the evolving threat landscape. “In the recent past, we could track some of the attacks and knew the normal patterns. Those “normal” patterns have all but disappeared. Without an equivalent—or greater— reactionary force on our side, we were facing an uphill battle to keep pace,” he says.

Chris sees the partnership growing in both directions, relying on DataDome for best practices and intelligence on emerging threats, while providing ticketing-specific insights in return. “We’re excited to grow with your product,” Christ says. “In the meantime, I’m just happy that I can sleep a little better at night.”

Bot attacks and aggressive ticket scalping are getting more sophisticated by the day. Find out how DataDome keeps you ahead by running a free Vulnerability Scan today.