Students scalp Billy Joel seats for high profits

"Just name your price," one of the postings said. "I'll pay a huge profit for one ticket, I'm dying to go."

One response: "I have two Billy Joel tickets for sale. Best offer by midnight gets them."

Just hours after the winners of the ticket lottery for the Billy Joel concert were announced last week, the newsgroup upenn.forsale was riddled with postings offering up to 25 times face value for the $5 tickets or asking for bids on extra tickets.

Students were vying for a chance to see the rock star tomorrow at Irvine Auditorium. But the Social Planning and Events Committee and the Office of the Vice Provost of University Life -- which together sponsored the event -- have been threatening scalpers with action from the Office of Student Conduct.

"We teamed up with the vice provost's office to bring Billy Joel here as cheaply as possible, so students wouldn't have to pay $30," SPEC Vice President Christina Chiew said. "But with people on upenn.forsale asking to buy tickets for much more money than students paid, it's hard to keep control over scalping."

Students who posted generous offers on the newsgroup, which is run on the Penn network, were contacted by others willing to sell for prices ranging from slightly inflated costs to offers well over $100 for a ticket.

And though many scalpers also received multiple offers, some are now facing repercussions from SPEC and potentially from the Office of Student Conduct. Chiew said that 19 students received e-mail warnings, while three others were asked by e-mail to return their tickets.

"We've been looking on public domain sites... for anyone who asked for buyers," Chiew, a College senior, said. "For people who are obviously trying to sell the tickets for much more money than they paid for them, we asked them to turn in their tickets."

And even though scalping -- selling tickets for substantially more than face value -- is illegal in Pennsylvania, several students said their actions were innocuous and that enforcing the law was pointless.

"Christina Chiew sent me an e-mail saying that I have to return the tickets as a result of illegal scalping... There are certain legal things that they're threatening me with," said one student who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I think it's silly that they want to crack down now."

The student added that he felt that SPEC was blackmailing him by threatening to release his name unless he returned his ticket.

SPEC representatives said that the problem of scalping, more prevalent now than for other SPEC events, defies the spirit of the events they run. Students pay exorbitant fees when they should be paying only a few dollars for concerts and speeches, which are usually priced so reasonably that ticket sales do not cover the costs of bringing the speaker to campus.

Some fans said the situation seemed impossible to resolve without a venue large enough to accommodate a greater percentage of the University community.

Engineering junior Jonathon Kra and College sophomore David Shyovitz were so aggravated they posted an invitation to a "Billy Bite It Blow Out" for the night of the concert, saying "Burning effigies of Billy is still rock and roll to me."

"I'm a big fan, I listen to a lot of his music, and so I was dying to go," Shyovitz explained. "It's kind of frustrating that... people enter the raffle just to turn around and scalp the tickets. I wish there was some way they could check to make sure that people who are going to the concert are actually the people who entered the lottery."

Although the situation doesn't seem to have any simple solution, some fans said that almost anything would be better than the current random system.

"I'm a big Billy Joel fan... I think there should have been some other way for diehard fans to get tickets," Engineering senior Kenneth Gross said. "People got tickets who don't even seem to like Billy Joel that much."

He said the ability to obtain a ticket should depend on dedication, not on financial resources.

"The line works for basketball in getting diehard fans the best tickets -- they could try something like that," Gross said.

Although Chiew said SPEC is unwilling to revert to that sort of system right now, the committee is planning actions to avoid this type of situation in the future.

SPEC is not allowing those who have been caught scalping to attend future events, and it is considering making tickets non-transferrable.

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