Recently, I bought tickets through their web page, and the seat hold timed out prematurely, making me reselect seats.

The tickets had been on sale for weeks, but in that 60 second window, scalpers just happened to buy the exact block I wanted out of 100’s of available seats.

Of course, ticket master owns some of the scalper companies.

Despite the blatant false advertising / auction fixing, I have no way to prove the above happened.

Anyway, a breakup of that company can’t come soon enough.

"Ticketmaster and Stubhub Caught Colluding With Scalpers" https://kslnewsradio.com/1891544/opinion-ticketmaster-isnt-c...

"Ticketmaster Has Secretly Been Cheating You With Its Own Scalpers" https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/ticketmaster-cheating-...

I’ve posted this before but I was fooled by a StubHub setup that looked like it was the venue itself - and not accidentally. So when I bought a ticket I was shocked to get an email from StubHub.

When I double checked and found the venue I had overpaid by 100% and StubHub refused to refund me.

I can't speak to your particular case, but my ticketmaster transactions often fail to complete for various reasons. After one falls through, if I wish to purchase the same seats again, they're often unavailable. This isn't because some scalper swooped in and bought them, the person who has dibs on them is me, in my previous defunct transaction. I usually find that if I wait ~ 15 minutes the hold will be released, and the tickets will be available for me to try again.

I think there's a non-zero chance that scalpers are watching the list of available ticket blocks, comparing frequently to find when a block becomes unavailable (because it's in a cart), and then monitoring and automatically buying any "missing" ticket blocks as soon as they reappear. That's what I would do, anyways.

That said, I would not be surprised in the least if this was being aided by ticketmaster or they were straight up doing it themselves. I just think there is a possible explanation where they are ignorant rather than malicious.