A major scandal has erupted in Mexico over concert ticket sales. It all began with the chaotic sale of tickets for BTS concerts in May, which were sold out within minutes. Fans, known as BTS Army, accused Ticketmaster and Ocesa of allowing scalpers to hoard a massive number of tickets. In response, the fans devised an original form of revenge: they began to mass-register the scalpers' data on various websites. For instance, one user shared a screenshot of an application to the Universidad del Valle de México (UVM), where the scalper was issued a monthly payment slip of 7,774 pesos under a scholarship scheme. The ticket sellers' data was also used to register for banking services, investment funds, and even funeral homes. In parallel, the movement has escalated to the institutional level through an alliance with the online consumer organization TecCheck. On the Change.org platform, they filed a formal petition with the Ministry of Economics, calling for an inter-institutional investigation involving the Federal Consumer Prosecutor's Office (Profeco) and the Antitrust Commission. The petition details the issues faced by buyers: “The virtual queue was full of failures, the website had constant errors, ticket prices inexplicably increased at the time of purchase, and when you finally managed to get in, the platinum tickets were already sold out.” The central goal of this request is to analyze dynamic pricing, the operation of virtual queues, and the alleged inefficiency of filters to prevent bot use in ticket acquisition. The petition organizers argue that Profeco alone lacks the necessary authority to analyze market power, requiring coordinated state action. “We demand that Ticketmaster OCESA be removed from ticket sales in Mexico and that stricter regulations on transparency and ethics in ticket sales be implemented,” the petition states. By 7 p.m. on Tuesday, January 27, the petition had garnered over 231,000 verified signatures. “Don’t make Army angry.”
