The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Eliminates Ticket Scalpers with DataDome

The Problem: Bots, Chargebacks, and Infrastructure Strain

Scalping is the enemy of every online ticket seller, and The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is no exception.

“Every time we have a big event go on sale, we observe huge spikes in traffic. A portion of this traffic is not our primary patrons but automated resellers who are trying to buy our tickets to sell them at inflated prices on the secondary market,” explains Patrick FitzGerald, Director of eCommerce Operations at The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

Unfortunately, their original bot mitigation solution couldn’t always stop the relentless bot attacks.

“Before DataDome, we used another mitigation product with no anti-scalping features. There were manual ways to identify suspect accounts and sometimes get their IP addresses or IP ranges, but it wasn’t an exact science. It was very time consuming for me,” says Patrick.

This situation had several consequences for The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. According to Patrick, “A lot of tickets would end up on the secondary market, sometimes preventing patrons from getting tickets directly from us. There was also a financial impact since we occasionally got hit with chargebacks. Additionally, having junk traffic on your website infrastructure implies running additional instances.”

The Solution: Threat Detection, Anti-Scalping, & AWS-Friendly Integration

When investigating a new solution capable of addressing all of these issues, Patrick decided to give DataDome a shot.

“I was looking for a provider that was able to identify and block the scalpers but also could prevent credential stuffing and detect fake account creation. Since we switched over to a new payment solution, we needed an additional layer of protection against payment fraud. In addition, we wanted a solution that could integrate seamlessly with AWS. DataDome met all of our expectations,” says Patrick.

He also appreciates the detailed DataDome dashboard that provides a real time view of bot activity. “I enjoy the real-time view when we’re doing a live sale. The dashboard is slick and intuitive, and I can see all those threats—scraping, scalping, credential stuffing, DDoS—being blocked in real time. It’s pretty cool!” Patrick enthuses.

As an “AWS Service Ready” solution, the DataDome integration was simple thanks to the CloudFront module. ”This was a must-have for us and the DataDome team was very helpful in getting it set up,” Patrick confirms.

The Results: No More Bot Traffic, A Fair Purchasing Process, & Cost Savings

Since the deployment of the DataDome solution, The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has successfully prevented bot scalpers from purchasing event tickets. As a result, the purchasing process is more fair for genuine patrons.

“DataDome reduces a lot of the malicious traffic. I can now see that scalpers are always looking for tickets to be released, constantly pinging our site every 20 or 30 seconds, but we can filter them out,” Patrick attests.

In this way, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust even saves money by reducing the number of instances they need to run.

“One of the biggest benefits of using DataDome is our ability to now identify all the different threat types. It provides a classification of these threats so we can assess their criticality level and continue enhancing our protection over time,” Patrick adds.

Beyond these results, DataDome’s reliability as a technical partner is very important to The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

“I have opened two or three tickets, and the DataDome support team got back to us with good technical solutions. I told one of my colleagues that this is exactly how tech support is supposed to work. It’s an excellent team and they’re great to work with,” Patrick concludes.