How SeatGeek uses centralized device and behavioral intelligence to protect high-demand ticket drops with Sardine
Tickets are valuable, instantly transferable, and highly liquid, making live event marketplaces prime targets for fraud. Platforms like SeatGeek must stop bot attacks and stolen payment attempts, without slowing legitimate fans during high-demand ticket drops.
SeatGeek is a ticket marketplace that connects millions of fans to live events around the U.S.. But the same qualities that make tickets easy for fans to buy and transfer — high value, instant delivery, and fast resale — also make them attractive targets for fraudsters. As a result, SeatGeek must constantly balance speed, security, and conversion.
To maintain that balance, SeatGeek moved away from fragmented legacy tools and toward a centralized intelligence platform powered by Sardine.
Since partnering with Sardine, SeatGeek has centralized fraud investigations and review workflows in a single platform. Instead of relying on fragmented tools and manual investigation steps, the team can review risk signals, support agent decisioning, and build custom rules in one place. This gives SeatGeek more agility during high-demand ticket drops, where speed and accuracy both matter.
The challenge: Constant tuning and the “false positive” tax
Fraud teams at major marketplaces often find themselves stuck in a cycle of reactive defense. Fighting account takeovers and stolen credit card use with tools that cannot keep pace creates a massive operational bottleneck. To stop fraud losses, teams are often forced to tighten rules, but those broad strokes inadvertently block some legitimate fans.
“We were facing quite a challenge from a fraud loss perspective. There were a lot of instances of account takeovers and new accounts being created and then orders placed using stolen credit cards. When we tried to reject more of what we thought was fraud, that led to a lot of false positives. So we were having a hard time managing both sides of it, either too much fraud loss or too many insults.”
In practice, fragmented systems slowed investigations and made it harder for SeatGeek to respond consistently. This manifests in three specific ways:
- The false positives trap: When systems are fragmented and fraud losses run high, analysts are forced to create inefficient rules to reduce fraud but those also impact some good orders, causing issues with customer experience and loss of good sales.
- Constant data labeling for model tuning: Legacy models require constant “feedback” with labeled data. Teams often spend more time manually labeling stale events to train flailing models than they do actually preventing live fraud.
- The visibility gap: Without a centralized hub, an analyst must pivot between multiple providers just to verify if a user is masking their location or using a hijacked device. This fragmentation makes it challenging to act on threats in real-time.
The solution: Centralized behavioral intelligence
To break the cycle of manual work, SeatGeek partnered with Sardine to move beyond entity-centric rules and adopt a holistic view of user behavior.
“We were impressed by how the platform is structured to bring in the right types of data, centralize that information, and allow building custom rules,” said Prashant.
By integrating Sardine’s suite of device and behavioral biometrics, the team gained the ability to see the “how” behind every transaction. One major challenge was linking repeat actors across accounts and devices.
“The linking across multiple people, if they were using different accounts but the same IP, device, payment method, or location, was not being done very easily or consistently. That was a gap.”
Beyond the transaction
Sardine provides technical insights that legacy tools cannot reach. Sardine provides deep session-level telemetry, including device integrity, behavioral biometrics, and infrastructure signals, allowing SeatGeek to detect automated activity and coordinated fraud infrastructure before a transaction completes.
The team can now see if a "fan" is actually using copy-paste shortcuts to fill out fields, or if a device ID has been tethered to thousands of other accounts across the network. This allows SeatGeek to proactively stop activity between accounts that are linked to other known bad accounts.
Identity verification presented its own challenge. SeatGeek previously relied on users uploading static ID images, a process increasingly compromised by AI-generated photos. By integrating Sardine's live IDV and selfie checks, risk analysts and support reps can now trigger step-up verification for high-value purchases, adding a dynamic layer of protection that static images can't provide.
Rapid rule deployment
Sardine’s rule engine allows the team to build and deploy custom logic without waiting for engineering cycles. This agility is critical during major event launches, where fraud patterns shift in minutes. The team moved from manual SQL queries to an interface where they can test hypotheses against historical data and go live instantly.
“We needed a centralized location where we could bring all of that information together, build rules, and allow our agents to look at it so we could make quick decisions,”
Neutralizing coordinated networks
By leveraging Community Risk Intelligence, the team moved from investigating isolated accounts to neutralizing entire fraud infrastructures. By tracing the links between shared hardware IDs and IP addresses, SeatGeek can identify coordinated networks that use thousands of accounts to hoard tickets or move stolen funds.
The results: Operational efficiency at scale
“It’s not always about finding the risky elements. It’s just as important to identify trusted customers as well.”
The shift from manual workflows to automated intelligence allowed SeatGeek’s fraud team to focus on strategy instead of investigation. Analysts can now deploy new detection logic in minutes rather than waiting for engineering cycles. By collapsing data silos into a single, graph-powered view, the team gained the technical leverage necessary to turn an investigator's intuition into platform-wide protection.
- Decentralized strategy: By removing the need for manual labeling, analysts can now test and deploy defenses independently. This shifts the team's focus from administrative maintenance to active threat prevention and long-term risk architecture.
- Improved conversion accuracy: Higher detection precision means fewer legitimate fans are blocked during high-demand sales. This directly protects revenue and reduces the support volume that typically spikes when over-tuned, broad-stroke rules trigger false positives.
- Step-up verification at scale: The shift to live IDV directly translates to measurable loss prevention. During Super Bowl weekend, SeatGeek withheld $50K in tickets from users who failed identity verification and $35K from users who never responded, stopping $85K in fraud in less than 2 days.
- Network-level visibility: By identifying the true device location and behavioral red flags of coordinated actors, SeatGeek now neutralizes the infrastructure that powers fraud rings. They no longer wait for a chargeback to signal a problem; they identify the threat at the point of entry.
What’s next for SeatGeek + Sardine?
As SeatGeek continues to expand its global footprint and primary ticketing presence, the partnership with Sardine provides the technical foundation needed to scale safely. There is no room for complacency in an industry targeted by machine-learning-driven-fraud.
“You have the data and you have the platform to build custom rules. This will enable us to detect and take action on various types of fraud, ranging from traditional fraud to newer abuse vectors across buyers, sellers and brokers on the platform.”
Precise, data-driven prevention ensures that legitimate fans stay in the seats while bad actors are identified at the point of entry. This maintains the fan-forward experience where security is invisible that modern customers have come to expect that is also insurmountable for the fraudster. High-stakes event launches require this kind of surgical precision, allowing the team to trade reactive chores for a proactive defense that stays out of the fan's way.
