New York Comic Con’s producers are introducing a new ticketing process that it hopes will eliminate a team of villains more sinister than Hydra — ticket scalpers.
ReedPOP, the event organizer behind the popular annual nerd fest, hopes to weed out online scammers for this year’s convention by trying to verify that ticket buyers are actually fans.
“We’re taking the tickets from greedy resellers and trying to give them back to the honest, hard-working fans,” Lance Fensterman, head of ReedPOP, told The Post.
The new online system, which is open to the public this Friday and will be available until June 13, requires fans to create a profile that includes their basic information and a questionnaire.
“It’s another step and it’s going to take a few more minutes,” Fensterman said. “But I think for those hardcore fans, if it means it takes tickets out of brokers’ hands, they will happily go through one more step to make sure the people actually getting these tickets are fans.”
The pre-verification process will also trip internal alarms if online bots or scammers use fake email addresses or create multiple profiles, the company said. ReedPOP also hopes the data will give them an idea of how many people are going to try to purchase tickets once they are actually released, allowing them to better prepare servers so they don’t crash.
Fensterman said ReedPOP will announce the official ticket-sale day 48 hours in advance — via email to verified fans — to ward off scammers.
Tickets for the four-day October convention, one of the biggest in the world, will only be available on the company’s official website this year. Tickets usually sell out in less than a day.
Last year, the show drew 167,000 people, according to the company.


