Sam Fender postponed the presale for his two homecoming shows at Newcastle’s St James’ Park on Wednesday (October 28), citing a “sophisticated bot attack” on ticketing site Gigantic.
It follows Garth Brooks’ cancellation of a Kansas City matinee added to his Blame It All on My Roots Arena Tour, after his team said most of the more than 90,000 people in the ticket queue “turned out to be bots.”
Earlier this month, Raye said scalpers had used AI bots to swamp the presale sign-up for her one-off show at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Tickets for Fender’s Proper Massive Stadium Tour ’27 went on presale at 9:30am GMT on Wednesday, with access linked to pre-orders of his upcoming fourth album.
The tour opens with two nights at St James’ Park on June 3 and June 5, 2027. Presales for the rest of the tour went ahead through other ticketing sites, including Ticketmaster.
“Being told by the promoters that there’s been a sophisticated bot attack to the gigantic ticket site which is impacting the St James’ Park Pre-sale,” Fender wrote in an Instagram Story on Wednesday. “We’re going to have to move the Newcastle pre-sale to 9.30am tomorrow to ensure real fans get the tickets.”
That puts the Newcastle presale at 9:30am on Thursday (October 29), a day before general sale for the tour opens.
A notice on the verified Sam Fender Legends Instagram account said a “very limited number” of fans had bought tickets in the original presale before the website crashed, and that those tickets would be honored.
MBW has contacted Gigantic for comment.
The bot attack came days after Fender criticized proposed pricing for the tour and said a front-standing category, priced above general standing, had been removed.
In Kansas City, meanwhile, tickets for the Garth Brooks matinee at T-Mobile Center went on sale through AXS on October 23, and sales were halted shortly afterward.
“Due to excessive bot activity, ticket sales for Garth’s third show in Kansas City have been shut down,” Brooks’ team posted on X. “Garth and the promoters are evaluating next steps and the future of the show.”
“The bot situation is out of hand,” Brooks wrote in a post of his own. “It’s been progressively getting worse on this tour.
“With that said, my concern is for the people who managed to buy tickets today for the third show in Kansas City before the bots crashed the on sale. I will personally look into what can be done.”
“You have my word that all that can be done will be done,” Brooks added. “You have my deepest apologies for the results and my most sincere appreciation for your efforts today.”
On Monday (October 26), a statement on Brooks’ website called the on-sale “one of the most frustrating moments” of the tour, and confirmed the matinee would not go ahead.
“Because of social media posts and our history with Kansas City, I felt we left people unable to get tickets on the original on-sale,” Brooks said in the statement. “I was the one who suggested we put a lower bowl Saturday matinee up for sale.”
“When tickets went on sale that morning, more than 90,000 people were in the queue,” the statement said. “Most of that number turned out to be bots.
“AXS and the team at T-Mobile Center acted quickly to shut down the on-sale. There will be no Saturday matinee performance in Kansas City.”
Fans who bought matinee tickets will be refunded automatically, while Brooks’ two evening shows at the venue, on November 6 and November 7, will go ahead.
MBW has contacted AXS for comment.
Hours after the Kansas City sale was shut down, three Seattle shows sold out within minutes and Brooks added a fourth, with the on-sale taking him “well beyond the 500,000-ticket mark for the year,” according to the statement.
In September, Brooks shut down sales for a third show at Salt Lake City’s Delta Center after 30 minutes, citing “bot interference,” according to The Salt Lake Tribune. Tickets already sold for that show were honored, and he added a fourth Delta Center date.
“If the powers that be are not going to make scalping illegal, can you please make bot activity during on sales illegal?” Brooks said in a news release at the time. “It’s just not fair for the REAL person.”
In the US, the FTC and seven states sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster under the 2016 BOTS Act in September 2025, alleging that Ticketmaster knowingly let brokers buy more tickets than artists’ limits allowed.
In a court filing on October 13, the companies called the lawsuit “misguided” and said that in 2025, Ticketmaster “detected and blocked nearly 260 million attempts daily by bots to access its services.”
In the UK, the government announced plans in November 2025 to make it illegal to resell tickets above face value, and to bar individuals from reselling more tickets than they were allowed to buy.
The announcement came days after artists including Fender, Coldplay, Dua Lipa, and Radiohead wrote to the prime minister calling for a resale price cap, MBW reported.
In May, those plans appeared in the King’s Speech as a draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill, which must go through pre-legislative scrutiny before it can be introduced to Parliament.
Raye said on October 13 that the sign-up for her Royal Albert Hall presale had drawn 1.8 million registrations for 5,000 seats, as MBW reported at the time. The sign-up ran through a page hosted by fan marketing platform co:brand, which declined to comment when contacted.
“Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations,” Raye wrote. “It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale.”
After the Raye presale, a Royal Albert Hall spokesperson told the BBC that the venue “invest[s] heavily” in protecting its ticketing systems from “automated attacks,” but that the “law needs to catch up.”Music Business Worldwide