Ticket touts say big ticketing companies helped them
Image credit: appshunter.io
The enemy of all music lovers and concert-goers, the ticket touts, are claiming that ticketing companies are actually in on their schemes.
Ticket touts are the sleazebags who prevent people from seeing live music and make money by forcing fans to pay inflated prices on tickets. Finally, action is being taken against ticket touters and recent landmark cases have seen courts convicting prolific touters.
The cases have revealed some potentially nasty implications: That the ticketing companies themselves have been aiding ticket touters. In a 2021 judgement against two prolific ticket touters (Peter Hunter and David Smith), the judge said that the case suggested “connivance and collusion” with the ticketing companies.
A similar case against the “Ticket Queen” Maria Chenery-Woods found similarly. The judge for that case and other ticket touts suggested that ticketing sites could be “complicit” in the reselling of tickets, making “substantial profits” by aiding touts.
Both Peter Hunter and Maria Chenery-Woods used the UK’s four biggest ticket resale sites to take advantage of concert-goers; StubHub, Viagogo, and two Ticketmaster-owned companies GetMeIn! and Seatwave. The BBC have revealed the potential depth of relationship between ticketing companies and the touts who take advantage of them.
The BBC found that: “Former staff at resale sites which Ticketmaster used to own told us they worked closely with touts, and court documents at the trial of Chenery Woods’ associates revealed two staff at those companies bought tickets for touts.”
In response to the claims, Ticketmaster said that the allegations refer to “companies that were dissolved in 2018 and alleged events from over a decade ago, which no relevance to today’s ticketing landscape.” Hunter and Chenery-Woods’ activities ended in 2017.
They are damning statements that could show the companies responsible for live music tickets complicit in schemes that Virgin Media O2 estimate costs music fans £145 million each year. Earlier in the year, the UK Government revealed plans to “tackle greedy ticket touts” with new regulation on ticket resales.
Currently, reselling tickets for live performances for a profit is not illegal. The reason these touters were charged was because of the fraudulent methods they used to surpass restrictions on the number of tickets they could buy. Both Hunter and Chenery-Woods reportedly made millions with their activities.
The BBC report that a former member of Ticketmaster-owned Seatwave told them that touts were “VIPs” on their site. They added: “They were doing a lot of business for us. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions.”