Comedian Louis C.K. is waging war on ticket touts by selling access to his shows online and vowing to cancel any seats that are passed on.
The funnyman has become increasingly frustrated seeing touts - known as 'scalpers' in the U.S. - charging his fans extortionate rates for tickets to his sold-out concerts.
So he's devised his own way of tackling them by selling passes to his gigs directly to fans through his website and banning anyone who sells their ticket on to a third party.
In a post on his website, C.K. writes, "Making my shows affordable has always been my goal but two things have always worked against that. High ticket charges and ticket re-sellers marking up the prices. Some ticketing services charge more than 40 (per cent) over the ticket price and, ironically, the lower I've made my ticket prices, the more scalpers have bought them up, so the more fans have paid for a lot of my tickets.
"By selling the tickets exclusively on my site, I've cut the ticket charges way down and absorbed them into the ticket price. To buy a ticket, you join Nothing. Just use your credit card and buy the damn thing. Opt in to the email list if you want, and you'll only get emails from me.
"Also, you'll see that if you try to sell the ticket anywhere for anything above the original price, we have the right to cancel your ticket (and refund your money). This is something I intend to enforce. There are some other rules you may find annoying but they are meant to prevent someone who has no intention of seeing the show from buying the ticket and just flipping it for twice the price from a thousand miles away."