I have absolutely no doubt.
Case in point. I bought tickets for Dynamite but it was for around April 2020 and was cancelled. I got an email from ticketmaster late summer saying my ticket was valid for a rescheduled show in October (a few weeks ago) or I could take a refund. I took the refund, I originally bought the ticket in early 2020 when I was still interested if they'd turn out to be good but that's long passed.
Out of curiosity, I was checking the ticket resale apps in the few days running up to the show. Up until around Tuesday afternoon there was only very select tickets available and the nosebleed tickets started around $150, a couple of floor tickets listed at several hundred $$$.
I'm in a city, so that's typical of very big concerts since the demand is huge, the prices go really high... But even WWE events that run the "big" arena in town don't have that kind of price hike unless it's a PPV. AEW only run a small college arena in the suburbs, so it was insane prices.
Anyway, I checked again Wednesday afternoon. LOADS of tickets available in most sections around the arena... I could have gotten a ticket for as low as $6 at one point.
There's absolutely no way that was organic. The only way this could have happened was if someone bought back a lot of tickets, held on to most to try and hike the price to make the show look "in demand", then on the day of, got desperate at the lack of sales and tried giving them away for next to nothing.
I checked the show on TV. They had a "decent" sized crowd with a bunch of open seats scattered all over but nowhere close to a sellout. Had I not looked at the market after Tuesday afternoon, I would have assumed the show was a complete sellout with tickets only available on the secondary market for several hundred dollars, but infact they could not sell it out by giving them away at $6 last minute.
