Stop Scalpers, Chargebacks, and Chaos at Your Rodeo

Chargebacks. Scalpers. Chaos.

All three are a recipe for disaster for your rodeo.

Chargebacks eat into your revenue and profits. Scalpers do wrong by your attendees. And, disruptive attendees ruin the experience for others.

But, you’re not helpless against these forces. You can fight back to mitigate and prevent these bad actors and excessive chargebacks from running your rodeo into the ground. And, it’s not hard.

This comprehensive guide covers:

• What Are Chargebacks
• How to Fight Chargebacks
• How to Stop Chargebacks
• How to Stop Scalpers
• How to Remove Disruptive Attendees

Using this guide, you’ll enhance your chargeback management strategy and reduce chargeback fraud at your rodeo. You'll also know what to look for as you evaluate chargeback prevention software offered by ticketing companies.

What Are Chargebacks

Chargebacks occur for many reasons:

• stolen credit cards
• miscommunication on a shared credit card
• disappointed attendees
• scalpers

You may encounter several types of fraud:

1. Friendly Fraud – Your attendee disputes the legitimate ticket charge on their credit card. (e.g. One spouse buys tickets. The other doesn’t recognize the charge and disputes it.)
2. Credit Card Fraud – A thief used a stolen credit card to buy tickets. Your ticket sale was an unauthorized purchase. They may have even resold them to other people. The person whose credit card was stolen is a victim of theft, just as much as your rodeo is.
3. Chargeback Fraud – A disappointed attendee decides to refund themselves or a scalper buys tickets to resell them.

You've probably seen all kinds of chargebacks and encountered an illegitimate chargeback or two. You're looking for effective ways to fight chargebacks and chargeback prevention.

How to Fight Chargebacks

When someone makes a chargeback claim with their bank or credit card company, you’ll be notified by your processor. You’ll be able to respond with a chargeback dispute. 

Some ticketing companies have all of their clients on their payment processor, which means they take responsibility for the whole chargeback process to fight those claims for you. If you’re on your own processor, you’ll be managing chargebacks yourself.

It’s hard to know if you’ll win a chargeback claim on a transaction, even if you’ve provided strong evidence for your case. Even credit card holders who’ve filed unwarranted chargebacks may win those fraudulent chargebacks. It’s unfair, but the arbiter of chargeback claims is the bank or credit card issuer themselves. Card issuers are biased in favor of their client, the credit card holder.

If you’ve filed your initial dispute and lost the chargeback, you can dispute it further. However, you’ll need to put forward additional money to continue the dispute and will have to pay more if you lose. It can be better to just take the loss.

Keep in mind that you’ll also pay a chargeback fee for each chargeback dispute you lose. In most cases, the chargeback fee is $7. Chargeback rates can vary and be as high as $100.

Chargeback management is grueling work, so it can save you a lot of time to find a ticketing company who takes care of that for you. Rodeo Ticket fights the chargebacks that come through on our processor, so our clients don’t have to worry about that.

While you need to have a strong chargeback management plan, it’s better to prevent chargebacks. Rodeo Ticket also offers effective chargeback prevention tools.

How to Stop Chargebacks

An ounce of fraud prevention is worth a pound of cure. And, there’s a lot you can do to stop chargebacks before they happen. Review the seven ideas below as you build your chargeback prevention strategy:

1. Review your refund policy and practices.
2. Consider event cancellation insurance.
3. Flag suspicious orders.
4. Set order limits.
5. Block bad actors.
6. Turn on reCaptcha verification.
7. Use your payment processor’s fraud prevention tools.

Even with the best strategy and prevention tools, chargebacks have become so common that they are a cost of doing business. Rather than focusing on eliminating chargebacks entirely, target a chargeback ratio that makes sense for your rodeo and revenue.

1. Review Your Refund Policy & Practices

Some friendly fraud happens when people can’t make a return or get a refund like they want to. The first piece of common advice to reduce chargebacks is to have a generous return or refund policy because with all of the chargeback fees, it makes sense to just process the return.

However, it’s common to have a strict no refunds policy with ticketing. It makes a lot of sense because you can’t run your rodeo if refunds take a bite out of your revenue. By the same logic, chargebacks also take a bite out of your revenue.

You don’t necessarily have to change your refund policy. Instead focus on being reasonable when someone reaches out to request a refund on a transaction. Base your decisions on why they’re requesting a refund and the timeliness of their request. If they make their request within a day of making the purchase, consider offering the refund. 

Honoring refund requests early, means you still have time to sell those tickets to someone else. Of course, stick to your no refund policy after your rodeo has occurred.

2. Consider Event Cancellation Insurance

Event cancellation insurance can help prevent chargebacks if you have to cancel your rodeo. Often the event cancellation insurance is passed along to attendees when they buy tickets. If you have to cancel your event for situations covered by the policy, you can make a claim and have funds to cover refunds for your participants. That’s better than having to deal with chargebacks over a cancelled event. 

Be sure to review the terms of the cancellation insurance policy since some situations aren’t covered.

3. Flag Suspicious Orders

Review your sales reports regularly to identify potential fraudulent activity. Look for:

• Multiple transactions from the same card or email address
• Large orders

Reach out to the people who made these orders. It can often be easiest to get in contact via phone call, so be sure to ask for a phone number on your ticketing form. If not, you can always send an email to set up a call.

As you review your sales orders look for additional fraud patterns and chargeback trends specific to your rodeo to stop more potential chargebacks. You should also look at your chargeback data each year to find more characteristics of suspicious transactions.

In your communication, you want to ask questions to figure out if it’s a legitimate transaction. It could be a church group attending your rodeo together. Or, someone is having a big family reunion and needed to buy more tickets. Be thorough and use your best judgment to determine if this person is making a legitimate order.

Some ticketing companies offer fraudulent transaction and suspicious order flagging for fraud detection so you don’t have to review every single order. This kind of fraud detection tool can even pre-emptively block potentially fraudulent transactions so you can review them before they process.

4. Set Order Limits

To make it easier to identify suspicious orders, set limits on how many tickets can be purchased in an order. Having to make multiple orders won’t deter fraudsters from buying tickets, but it will make it easier for you to identify suspicious orders.

5. Block Bad Actors

Ticketing companies also offer ways to block bad actors, which can really make a dent in your chargeback volume.

You can often set parameters for what kind of transaction you want to block. While this approach is effective, it can prevent legitimate transactions from processing. If it’s hard to buy tickets to your event, you’ll sell fewer tickets. You’ll need to weigh this tradeoff and your chargeback risk when you make these settings.

Another approach to purchase blocking is to block chargeback offenders after they’ve made a chargeback. This approach prevents the bad actors from making future purchases from your rodeo. It’s long-term fraud prevention because you have to let the bad actors identify themselves first, which means paying some chargebacks.

Talk to your ticketing company to learn more about the chargeback fraud prevention tools they offer.

6. Turn on reCaptcha verification

Some fraudsters create bots to make orders and process transactions. You can deter bots by turning on reCaptcha verification to help ensure that each order is made by a person instead of a bot.

7. Use Your Payment Processor’s Fraud Prevention Tools

Payment processors often have settings and tools that prevent fraud. These tools tend to be very blunt and can block a ton of legitimate transactions. If you’re on your own payment processor, talk to them about what they offer. You can test using them for a day to see how it affects your sales volume. If you don’t notice a big difference and don’t get calls from people trying to buy tickets, then keep it on.

You can also talk to your ticketing company to learn more about how they work with their processor on fraud detection and chargeback prevention.

Case Study: Cowtown Rodeo

The Cowtown Rodeo in Pilesgrove, New Jersey had been plagued by chargebacks for years. We worked to address this problem by creating tools to block future chargebacks from repeat offenders.

In 2023, Cowtown Rodeo had $14,000+ in chargebacks. After we released our scalping blocker in 2024, they cut their chargebacks almost in half to: $8,147.

While not every chargeback can be prevented, you can create a strong defense. Rodeo Ticket offers multi-faceted tools that you can use to stop your chargeback regulars and even flag suspicious orders.

How to Stop Scalpers

Some scalpers issue chargebacks. Others do not. Even the scalpers who aren’t stealing from you with chargebacks still affect your rodeo. Double-sold seats and invalid tickets create a customer service nightmare at the gate.

And, if scalped tickets are more expensive than your regular sales prices, it makes a hard customer service conversation more difficult.

If you have known scalpers, you can stop their transactions in the future with Rodeo Ticket’s tools for blocking purchases and flagging suspicious orders. Your chargeback prevention solutions also help fight scalping.

If you have a lot of scalping, there is one additional way to undercut your scalpers while keeping legitimate orders running smoothly:

Delay Ticket Delivery

Deter scalping by delaying ticket delivery. You can opt to require will call so people have to pick up their tickets at the box office with identification. Be strict on requiring ID for pick up because that’s going to be the most effective way to undercut your ticket scalpers.

Another way to delay ticket delivery is to omit tickets from your confirmation emails. You can schedule tickets to be sent later based on the event time. This approach also has the benefit of making it easier for your attendees to find their tickets – they won’t have to go digging for the confirmation email that they got a month ago.

Case Study: Strawberry Days Rodeo

The Strawberry Days Rodeo in Pleasant Grove, Utah had had their tickets scalped for years. The scalpers sold their tickets at a high markup, which harmed their branding as a family-friendly rodeo.

With Rodeo Ticket’s tools, the Strawberry Days Rodeo prevented scalpers from buying its tickets in the first place, so it could remain the sole source for purchasing Strawberry Days Rodeo tickets. 

How to Remove Disruptive Attendees

Someone picking a fight or drinking too much or being too loud makes for a worse experience at your rodeo.

You definitely don’t want those people coming back to your rodeo. With Rodeo Ticket’s tools, you can block those folks from buying tickets to your next rodeo. You’ll save yourself stress and ensure your attendees have a positive experience every time they come.