Steve Lambert, THE CANADIAN PRESS

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WINNIPEG - Planning to go to a concert featuring a popular singer? Or a matchup between two top sports teams? If you want tickets, you'll likely have to battle professional scalpers, some of whom are using software that allows them to quickly snap up thousands of tickets.

The phenomenon of events at arenas or stadiums selling out within minutes is growing, leaving fans frustrated and fuming.

"I thought it was a fix, I couldn't believe it," said Brian Hunter, who lined up early one morning at a Winnipeg Ticketmaster outlet to buy tickets to a 2004 Hilary Duff concert for his granddaughter. Hunter was third in line and got to the window within a couple of minutes. He was shocked when the agent told him the event had just sold out.

"By the time the ordinary Joe goes to get a ticket, they're all gone."

The frustration is felt not just by people who take the old-school approach and line up at the box office. Cristina Poeppl and her friends had a hard time buying tickets online to some of the shows on Radiohead's North American tour this summer.

"We find that super-frustrating because we really want to go to a show ... and we try our best and we get infuriated that scalpers end up taking tickets away from real fans," Poeppl said.

Ticketmaster tries to prevent mass ticket-buying by limiting the number of tickets any one person can buy, and by requiring consumers to retype squiggly words that appear on its website. The aim is to ensure that a human being is making the purchase, not an automated program run by scalpers, or "ticket brokers" as they are called within the industry.

The problem is, some brokers have obtained software that can either bypass the squiggly words or read them and retype them instantaneously. Run that software on a bank of computers and bingo, you can bombard Ticketmaster, snap up hundreds or thousands of tickets and resell them to fans at a huge profit.

Earlier this year, Ticketmaster won a permanent injunction in California against software developer RMG Technologies Inc. Court records showed one broker who used RMG's program was able to make 600,000 ticket requests in a single day.

"We do everything possible to ensure that the tickets ... are distributed as fairly and equitably as possible," Ticketmaster vice-president Joe Freeman said from the company's headquarters in West Hollywood, Calif.

RMG was ordered by a federal court to pay US$18.2 million to Ticketmaster and barred from selling its ticket-buying system.

Meanwhile, the use of automated programs by ticket resellers continues. That means fans have to prepare for a fast-paced battle in which a couple of minutes can mean the difference between getting good seats to a show and getting no tickets at all.

Last spring, Poeppl and several friends in various North American cities teamed up to snare tickets to Radiohead's summer tour, deciding on a list of dates and venues they would try for. When the sale began, they co-ordinated their efforts via text messaging and instant messaging, letting each other know whether they had secured tickets to shows in Seattle, Vancouver, Los Angeles or Toronto.

"It was a whole lot of panic," laughs Brittany Abbott, Poeppl's friend in Seattle.

"We thought we weren't going to get any Seattle tickets ... nothing was coming up at all, we were completely panicked. But in the end, we ended up with more Seattle tickets than anything."

The group effort led to some surplus tickets, which were sold to other Radiohead fans for the same price.

There are other ways to increase your odds of getting tickets to a popular event. A small number of tickets are often made available on fan sites or through companies such as American Express or Best Buy before an official sale starts.

Tickets to some events are also available to employees of local corporate sponsors. Some of those elusive Hilary Duff tickets in Winnipeg had been pre-sold to employees of MTS and other companies.

And there is still the option that leaves a bad taste in the mouth for many fans - online resellers. It may be the only way to get seats to a sold-out show, but a single ticket can set you back several hundred dollars.

When aging rockers the Who announced plans to play Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, Ont., in October, the $147.50 seats at floor level sold out quickly. Some of those seats were quickly offered by resellers on the TicketsNow website, which is owned by Ticketmaster, for prices ranging from $284 to $1,070.

It's good business for Ticketmaster. They get a cut of the resold ticket, making a second profit off the same ticket they sold originally.

The company says its TicketsNow site provides an important service for fans who were shut out the first time around.

"We perceive a great opportunity to bring a much higher level of consumer satisfaction and customer service to the resale arena that fans across North America have been embracing in increasing numbers," Freeman said.

Unlike some other resale sites, TicketsNow pre-screens resellers, offering fans a degree of protection against fraud, he said.

Ticketmaster supports the basic concept of reselling, Freeman said, but is continuing to work on new technology to stop resellers from bombarding its site and snapping up a huge number of tickets.

Fans are doubtful they will ever have a level playing field with scalpers.

"It seems like they're always going to be smarter than us or have more technology than us," Abbott said.