Brazil Ticket Rules Target Bots, Resale Without Price Cap

Brazil has adopted a sweeping new set of ticketing regulations that will require upfront fee disclosure, free ticket transfers and greater transparency from resale marketplaces while imposing new safeguards against bots, dynamic price changes during checkout and other practices across the primary market.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed Decree No. 13,108 on August 31, establishing nationwide consumer-protection rules for ticket sales through box offices, websites, apps and other channels. The regulations cover concerts, festivals and other ticketed events, but specifically exclude sporting events, which are governed separately under Brazil’s General Sports Law.

The rules are notably broad at a time when lawmakers in the United States, Canada and elsewhere have increasingly focused ticketing legislation on the secondary market. Brazil’s decree places significant requirements on both primary ticket sellers and resale platforms — while stopping short of imposing a fixed cap on what an individual may charge when reselling a ticket.

Most provisions took effect upon publication September 1. Requirements involving anti-bot measures, secondary-market disclosures, temporary ticket reservations, data retention and ticket transfers take effect 20 days after publication.

Resale Rules Stop Short of Price Cap

Brazil’s government explicitly says one of the decree’s objectives is to combat what it considers abusive or speculative ticket resale, and secondary marketplaces face some of the measure’s most detailed new requirements.

Resale platforms must display the total ticket price and associated fees from the beginning of the purchase process. Sellers will be required to self-declare the ticket’s original face value, while marketplaces must tell buyers when a ticket is being offered above that amount and whether the seller is an individual or a business.

Platforms must also prominently disclose that they are not the official seller for an event, both on their home pages and immediately before a transaction is completed. They are required to establish a reporting mechanism for potentially abusive listings and deploy systems intended to detect patterns indicating habitual, professional or organized resale activity.

The decree also calls on secondary platforms to remove or suspend listings connected to automated purchasing, abusive resale or other prohibited practices and to use technology and marketplace design intended to discourage what regulators describe as speculative resale.

Rather than prohibiting a ticket from being resold above face value, Brazil requires the marketplace to disclose that the ticket costs more than its original price. That approach differs materially from recent measures imposing or proposing face-value-based resale caps in jurisdictions including Ontario, Washington, D.C., Vermont and several U.S. states.

Brazil is targeting bots, misleading resale advertising, undisclosed markups and other practices associated with the secondary market without legally preventing a ticket holder from receiving more than the ticket’s original purchase price when demand rises.

Primary Sellers Face New Pricing and Transfer Rules

Primary ticketing companies will also have substantial new obligations.

Sellers must disclose the total ticket price and all additional fees from the consumer’s first contact with an offer. Both primary and secondary sellers must continue displaying those costs throughout the purchase process, and fees that duplicate another charge or do not correspond to an actual service can be treated as abusive. Companies must retain documentation showing how their fees were calculated and how those fees relate to services or operating costs.

The decree also directly addresses one particularly frustrating part of high-demand ticket onsales.

Once a consumer selects a ticket and enters the pre-purchase stage, the ticket must be temporarily reserved for enough time to complete the transaction. During that period, neither its price nor fees may change because of a new pricing tier, inventory batch, dynamic-pricing mechanism or similar system. The buyer must also be shown how much time remains to complete the purchase.

Virtual queues will be required to tell consumers their position in line, the estimated number of users ahead of them and an approximate waiting time.

Primary sellers must additionally deploy technology intended to prevent mass or abusive purchasing through bots, scripts and other automated tools, while high-demand sales may use purchase limits, preregistration and virtual queues.

Another potentially consequential requirement gives purchasers an explicit right to transfer a ticket to another person without paying a transfer fee.

The consumer right does not eliminate the primary seller’s technological role in the transaction, however. Under the decree, ownership transfers must take place exclusively through the official ticketing platform or a system supplied by it, allowing the ticket issuer to update ownership records and retain a traceable transfer history.

That creates an unusual combination of consumer and platform rights: the original purchaser cannot be charged simply to transfer a ticket, but the primary ticketing infrastructure remains the required mechanism through which the transfer occurs.

Brazil’s National Secretary of Digital Rights, Victor Oliveira Fernandes, said the free-transfer requirement is intended to preserve consumer ownership while the tracking and authentication requirements target fraudulent resale.

The new regulations also guarantee buyers full refunds, including ticket fees, when an event is canceled, postponed or materially changed. Consumers may instead choose to use the ticket for a rescheduled date or accept a credit for future use.

The decree separately strengthens Brazil’s statutory half-price ticket program by barring practices that artificially limit eligible inventory or make discounted tickets disproportionately difficult to purchase.

Brazil Already Pursuing Resale Platforms

The regulations arrive amid a wider enforcement campaign by Brazil’s National Consumer Secretariat, or Senacon, against online ticket resale businesses.

In July, Senacon opened an administrative proceeding against Viagogo after regulators said they found indications that consumers could have difficulty recognizing the site as a resale marketplace rather than an official ticket outlet. The agency ordered Viagogo to prominently disclose its secondary-market status, indicate that tickets are offered by third parties and warn that prices may be higher than those available through official sellers.

The same proceeding included a preliminary inquiry into StubHub Holdings. Senacon said StubHub had previously told the agency it did not operate in Brazil, but regulators cited a Portuguese-language service, prices displayed in Brazilian reais and listings for events in the country as indications that its platform could be targeting Brazilian consumers. StubHub was asked to provide additional information about its operations, fraud prevention and ticket authentication systems.

Senacon followed in August by opening proceedings against FunBuyNet and Buyticket over similar concerns. Both were ordered to strengthen disclosures that they operate as resale marketplaces and warn consumers immediately before checkout that tickets could cost more than through official channels.

Many of those requirements now appear directly in the nationwide decree.

The broader regulatory approach stands in contrast to some of the resale-focused proposals TicketNews has tracked in the United States. While the Brazilian government is openly critical of speculative ticket resale, its new framework simultaneously regulates primary pricing disclosures, ticket fees, queues, transfer restrictions and checkout practices rather than treating secondary-market prices as the only consumer issue.

Separate Water Rule Follows Taylor Swift Concert Tragedy

Lula also signed a separate event-safety decree requiring organizers to allow attendees to bring personal containers containing drinking water, subject to reasonable restrictions on container materials for safety reasons. Events expected to draw more than 1,000 people must also provide free drinking water through fountains or individual containers.

The water rules follow measures Brazil adopted after the November 2023 death of 23-year-old Ana Clara Benevides Machado during a Taylor Swift Eras Tour concert in Rio de Janeiro. Temperatures around the show approached 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and concertgoers complained about limited access to water and restrictions on bringing bottles into the stadium. Brazilian authorities subsequently required additional water access for Swift’s remaining shows.

Together, the two decrees amount to one of Brazil’s broadest attempts to set national rules around how consumers buy tickets, use them and attend major live events.