Not sure how many people were on Twitter this morning, but there were a lot of people talking about Joe Paterno's memorial service. Around 16,000 tickets went on sale, and from various reports they were sold in as little as thirty seconds to seven minutes. When I say tickets went on sale, they were actually free.
A couple hours after they were sold out, a pair of tickets went on sale on eBay with a starting bid of .99. After a couple of minutes there were around twenty three bidders and the pair of tickets went all the way up to $400.
If you aren't a normal eBay customer or maybe even if you are, eBay has a rule in place that if tickets to a certain event are free you aren't allowed to sell them. Well Twitter started to protest this auction and more and more people started to hear about what was going on. It eventually got so out of hand that people were putting in absurd bids just so this person wouldn't be able to sell them or collect money. Here's one of the screen shots after some of the bid inflation.
Well lets just say the bidding didn't just stop at twenty five thousand dollars. It kept going and going and going, just like the Energizer Bunny.
With the power of Twitter, people were protesting the auction. The only thing I was thinking was what happened if someone read the wrong rule. What if the person who was inflating this auction actually had to pay for it. That would have been pretty funny, (not for the winner though) because it didnt just stop at fifty thousand dollars, it kept going.
In the last screen shot I got, the total price for this auction got all the way up to $90,100. The final total I heard through Twitter was inflated to ninety eight thousand dollars. At this point though, eBay finally caught on and ended the auction.
I really have no idea what was going through this person's head. After looking through her eBay profile it seems like she was from California. What is a person from California doing grabbing tickets for an event in a day or so? She only had one intention in mind, and that was SELLING FREE TICKETS for money. I'm kinda glad people ran up the auction. Even though her attempt to sell them on eBay backfired, I wouldn't be surprised if she tried another website.
By the way if you are looking for tickets to the Joe Paterno Memorial I have the link to the Craigslist Ticket category for State College. There are a good number of postings of people trying to get ride of and get tickets for the memorial. Good luck scalping. http://pennstate.craigslist.org/tia/
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