Everyone, run! The bots are on the attack! I’m not trying out some new Halloween gimmick here - this is very much real. Bot farms are now besieging concert tickets at an industrial scale, leaving real people who want to attend either outbid or forced to settle for highly inflated resale prices. And that's only if the bots haven't destroyed everything in their path up until that point.

The bot issue has rankled the plans of several huge live draws this week. Geordie singer Sam Fender told fans that a “sophisticated bot attack” had hit the ticketing site used for his big homecoming shows in Newcastle next year, forcing him to push back the pre-sale until further notice.

Only days earlier, he pulled a ticket category from sale because he was unhappy with the huge cost to fans, which he claims was out of his control. Poor Fender may just want to earnestly play in his hometown to the type of people he grew up with, but the machine surrounding him has very different intentions, clearly.

And if you are country music legend Garth Brooks, the bots are taking over and getting entire shows cancelled. Brooks was forced to cancel the third show added to a ‘special matinee’-billed Kansas City performance because the sheer force of scalping bots brought the entire ticketing website down. A third show was originally added due to overwhelming demand, but fans being unable to pick up a ticket through the blinding plague of bots caused Brooks........

© Herald Scotland