Student scalpers making big bucks off Bibi

Some students with extra tickets to the speech have sold them for upwards of $40 each. So how many bucks would you pay for Bibi? Many Penn students holding unneeded tickets for former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech tonight in Irvine Auditorium did a little negotiating and found the cardboard tickets to be worth far more than their $10 face values. Students who were not winners in last week's Connaissance ticket lottery scrambled to acquire tickets all week and resale prices reportedly soared as high as $75 per ticket. Though money seemed to be the main motive for most sellers to offer their extra tickets at several times their original prices, many students said that their decision to sell came only after scheduling conflicts left them holding extra tickets for an event that they or their friends could not attend. College junior Wayne Yi sold his two tickets for the Netanyahu event at $25 each after receiving 10 responses to a posting on the upenn.forsale newsgroup. Yi -- who himself purchased the pair of tickets at a $20 per ticket resale price -- said he wanted to hear Netanyahu's speech, but was unable to attend because of a last-minute obligation. Wharton junior Greg Kneser had a more simple motive in mind when he purchased two Netanyahu tickets from the Connaissance lottery waiting list: a quick profit. Kneser said he was "not terribly interested in seeing Netanyahu speak" and entered the ticket lottery intending to resell his winnings. Kneser -- who briefly listed the tickets in an online eBay auction and then quickly removed them -- said the highest amount offered to him was $30 for the pair of tickets. He added that several students complained about his profit-seeking motive in responses to his upenn.forsale listing, with one student telling him that it was "outrageous" to sell the tickets for more than he paid for them. However, not all of those offering tickets for resale were quite as comfortable with the idea of making an easy profit. Engineering senior Ryan Bailey received four offers for the one ticket he was selling for $40. But he acknowledged the moral dilemma presented by profiting from a resale of tickets. "Morally, it's probably not the best situation," he said. "I had a pretty intense moral [battle]." But, he added, "My more basic motivations won out." And one ticket seller who asked to remain anonymous said he had received offers as high as $45 for an extra ticket to the event, though he is "waiting it out" until shortly before the event begins in the hopes of finding the highest possible bidder. "I'd rather sell it to someone who's really enthusiastic about going" than to the first person who wanted it, the seller said. Those on the receiving end of the scalped tickets have said they are not necessarily angered by the high prices. College senior Alan Lowinger paid $20 for one Netanyahu ticket, "which is not really that much, compared to other people," he noted. Lowinger -- who spent last semester living in Israel and is a Netanyahu supporter -- said he was "very disappointed" when he wasn't able to get a ticket in the Connaissance lottery. "I'm really lucky that I got to buy this ticket," he said. "Twenty dollars isn't that much because I really wanted to see him." And what does Connaissance have to say about all this? "It really saddens me," Conaissance Co-Director and Engineering junior Theo LeCompte said. "It's a problem we have with almost every event that we run," he said. "I don't like to see people taking advantage of students. "If they didn't want to go see the lecture, they shouldn't have purchased the ticket in the first place." LeCompte noted that Connaissance may choose to block those who are profiting from the Netanyahu event from participating in future Connaissance lotteries.