Three years after a ticket sales fiasco that led to a $16.5 million settlement,

By JENNIFER MALONEY

Three years after a ticket sales fiasco that led to a $16.5 million settlement, Bruce Springsteen fans were left frustrated on Friday when Ticketmaster's website was overwhelmed with traffic likely caused, the ticket giant said, by scalpers.
As seats went on sale at 10 a.m. Friday for Mr. Springsteen's performances at three venues in New York and New Jersey, traffic on the site shot up to a level 2.5 times higher than any point in the past year, Ticketmaster spokeswoman Jacqueline Peterson said.

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Bruce Springsteen performs earlier this month in Asbury Park, N.J.

Many fans trying to buy tickets received error messages and came away empty-handed. Meanwhile, online marketplaces such as eBay and StubHub listed tickets for sale by secondary brokers at prices hundreds of dollars higher than face value.
Ticketmaster's preliminary investigation suggests that much of the traffic came from "highly suspicious sources, implying that scalpers were using sophisticated computer programs to assault our systems and secure tickets with the sole intention of selling them in the resale market," Ms. Peterson said in an email.
On his website, Mr. Springsteen on Friday acknowledged the problems and posted a statement from Ticketmaster urging fans to be patient. A spokeswoman for Mr. Springsteen didn't respond to a request for comment.
For fans, the incident echoed the first day of ticket sales for Mr. Springsteen's 2009 tour, when they were redirected from Ticketmaster's site, without their knowledge, to the company's TicketsNow resale site, where tickets had been marked up by hundreds of dollars.

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The ensuing fury prompted a class-action lawsuit, a complaint from then-New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram and an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. Ticketmaster settled all three.
The company, now part of Live Nation Entertainment, has since changed its policy to alert customers when they are being redirected to another site.
The controversy also prompted Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D., N.J.) to propose legislation, called the BOSS Act, to prevent secondary brokers from purchasing tickets for the first 24 hours that they are available to the public. On Friday, he said he would reintroduce the legislation in the next couple of months.
"The fan is getting ripped off, period," he said in a phone interview.
He noted that StubHub, an online ticket marketplace owned by eBay, was offering more than 2,000 tickets for the three New Jersey shows.
"If this is for the fans, you and me, then how did a secondary broker get 2,000 tickets?" he said.
A spokesman for StubHub, Glenn Lehrman, said the company does not itself purchase tickets, but allows others to resell them through the site. He said he didn't know how some people were able to purchase tickets and offer them for resale, while others were unable to complete a purchase.
"I don't know how people purchased the tickets," he said. "We're sympathetic."
Jamie Brown, a musician and high-school teacher from Ocean Grove, N.J., said he spent more than four hours Friday trying to purchase a pair of seats for the May 2 show at the Prudential Center in Newark.
"It's something I wanted to surprise my fiancée with for Valentine's Day," he said. After agonizingly long waits, he twice got close to purchasing a pair of tickets, and both times was "booted off," once after he already had entered his credit card information, he said.
Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com