We spent eight weeks monitoring four of the biggest secondary ticketing sites and found tickets being resold that hadn’t even gone on sale yet. It seems touts are spoiling the fun for everyone.
Many of us have been there waiting for tickets to go on sale for a hotly anticipated event. You’re on the ticketing website, the tickets are released, and in a blink of an eye they’re all gone… and you’ve missed out.
At that point you probably either accept defeat, or you start trawling the internet ready to pay over the odds on a ticket resale website. We’ve spotted some tickets with a 1,760% mark up!
Ticket resale rip-off
We looked for unusual selling patterns on the sites Get Me In!, Seatwave, StubHub! and Viagogo.
We saw some tickets listed on re-sale sites before they were officially released. For example, there were 364 tickets listed on Stubhub! for Rod Stewart’s UK tour the day before pre-sale began.
In other cases tickets appeared simultaneously on primary and re-sale sites. Again on Rod Stewart’s same tour, 450 tickets were available on Get Me In! the moment the presale began on the primary site, two days later this had risen to 2,305 tickets.
Re-sale restrictions were ignored too. On Viagogo we saw tickets for Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet at the Barbican, despite the venue’s resale restrictions and asking for photo ID on the door. These tickets cost up to £1,500 (despite the original face value of £62.50).
We think that some of the selling patterns we encountered are only possible because of the use of ‘botnets’. There’s also a risk of fraud on ticket re-sale sites because sellers don’t have to prove they actually have the tickets they list.
And it seems that touts exploiting ticket re-sale sites are also on Prince’s radar. After the sale of tickets for Prince’s forthcoming tour were postponed by Ticketmaster, he tweeted:
MULTIPLE CHOICE: A. SCAVENGER B. VULTURE C. TOUT D. ALL OF THE ABOVE pic.twitter.com/IL4J5mZRhM
— Prince3EG (@Prince3EG) November 13, 2015
Prince then followed by tweeting a link to our investigation:
ANSWER THEREIN: https://t.co/XNEVanhkSH
— Prince3EG (@Prince3EG) November 13, 2015
What re-sale sites say
The re-sale sites we investigated promise refunds or replacements for fake tickets, and sellers are usually paid after the event to prevent false listings. But StubHub! admits that some ‘carefully vetted’ sellers are paid beforehand.
Under the Consumer Right Act you must be notified of restrictions, seating details and the original face value of the ticket. Ticketmaster told us its secondary sites Get Me In! and Seatwave would ultimately remove listings that fail to comply, yet we have found these rules being repeatedly flouted on all the major secondary ticketing sites.
Getting a fair deal
It’s frustrating when you lose out on popular tickets, and especially when they end up on sale at the same time on secondary sites at higher prices.
We think secondary ticketing sites should do more to ensure that listings adhere to the Consumer Rights Act so that fans understand what they’re buying. We’ve submitted our evidence to the Government as part of its ongoing review into secondary ticketing.
Do you think it’s fair that tickets appear on re-sale sites before or soon after they’ve gone on general sale?