It's weird. If you went to a store and bought all the apples, the owner of the store would love you. Do the same thing online, and suddenly you are facing federal felony charges.
It's not really the online part, it's the tickets part. If you went to the box office in person and tried to buy all the tickets, they wouldn't let you more than online.
Sounds like a job for mechanical turk. Have a bunch of people buy tickets, pay them a dollar via turk, pay the cost of the ticket when you receive it, resell for profit. Then you are not committing fraud, you are just buying tickets from your friends that don't want them anymore. "First sale" and all that.
It's clear that TicketMaster doesn't really want to solve this problem. If they did, they could solve it the same way the airlines did. (Hint: not by having a captcha on the credit card info page.)
But if I had my friends buy all the tickets and I then tried to scalp them:
- It would be totally fair if the concert venue chose to not honor those scalped tickets since I violated their ToS, and if they told me what a d--- I was...
