Raye says pre-registration for her Royal Albert Hall concert was overwhelmed by bots. 1.8 million people signed up for a 5,000-capacity hall, and her team ended up going through the list by hand.
What happened
On 13 October 2026 the artist posted on Instagram and X that "sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations", and that "I have never witnessed bots on this scale". Music Business Worldwide and Pollstar both report it. How many sign-ups were fake is her estimate, not a verified figure.
The concert, *This Symphony May Contain Hope*, is a one-off date on 23 October, with her second album reimagined alongside The Heritage Orchestra and Flames Collective. Instead of letting the presale run, the team went through the list by hand and shortlisted "people we believe are real fans". Those chosen received the code by email at 11:45 BST, and the presale opened at midday.
A spokesperson for the venue said they invest "heavily" in protection and that, even so, "we regularly see tickets advertised at vastly inflated prices". They added: "the law needs to catch up". The draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill, from November 2025 and included in the King's Speech of May 2026, addresses buying with bots and remains under pre-legislative scrutiny, according to MBW.
Why it matters
Pre-registration is sold as the defence against the tout: sign up first and we'll filter. Glastonbury uses it in the same way. What Raye describes didn't happen at the basket or at the per-buyer limit. It happened one screen earlier, at the form, which costs nothing to fill in and so is cheap to flood. Anti-fraud monitoring concentrates on payment, where there is a card and there is friction. And the fix wasn't technical either: it was people reading names to decide who looked like a real person. That doesn't scale.
What to do about it
- Measure sign-ups the way you measure sales: registrations per minute, per email domain, per IP range.
- Put a cost on the form before you open it: real email verification, a phone number, something that can't be automated cheaply.
- Check whether your per-person limit also covers registration. It usually starts at the basket, and by then it's too late.
- If your plan B is filtering the list by hand, work out the hours first, and who will put them in.