The New Ticket Scalpers Are Young, Unashamed, and Very Online

The moment that Harry Styles announced he would play a one-night-only album-release show at Los Angeles’ historic venue The Forum this December, the question was obvious: Would anyone survive the emotional turmoil of attempting to purchase a ticket to this concert?

Admission would be a mere $25, a gesture of goodwill to Styles’s fans. But to get into the show’s presale—the best chance of getting a ticket—fans would also have to buy merch or preorder a physical copy of Styles’s upcoming album, wait for a unique code, and jockey for a spot in a digital line of thousands of people, without any real clue as to how the order of the line was decided.

Preparing to pull off an improbable feat, Styles’s fans were crushingly supportive of one another, praying in public for their “mutuals” to get good spots on the floor of the arena, offering motivational speeches on Twitter, and blessing the timeline with rings of emoji candles, summoning good energy and a little of Harry’s magic. But when the sale ended, many were left empty-handed, horrified by “the real evil” of scalpers buying tickets out from under the people whose attachment is purer than a business pursuit. They weren’t surprised—this happens every time.

In this case, the scalpers were anonymous, but not that mysterious. They tweeted about themselves. Many of them came from pay-walled ticket-resale-coordination groups on Discord—the chat site originally popular with gaming communities—and were particularly excited about the one-night-only show, an event with an aura of specialness that would make it far more lucrative than any individual date on a later world tour.

[Read: How an app for gamers went mainstream]

“If you don’t go for Harry Styles today u so washed,” announced one of the longtime members (designated by the channel owner as “staff”) in a channel called Book of Resell on the day of the sale. “You’re a fool if you didn’t cop a