Ticket resale sites - Let this be the end.

[Guest]

Today a landmark case was heard here in the UK.  Sites like Viagogo and stubhub have been ticket resellers online for many years. Their reputation has been mixed at best. Here in the UK many thousands of people have ended up wasting money on tickets they cannot use often at many times the cover price of the ticket. These sites act as resellers for individuals so their terms often mean those ripped off have little chance of reclaiming their money. What is even worse are touts bulk buying tickets then selling them through these online platforms for huge multiples of the box office price. Over the years artists and bands like Pearl Jam have made a stand against overly marked up ticket sales, the reseller market take thinks to a whole new level. In this case Ed Sheeran made a stand.

 

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Two internet ticket touts who re-sold tickets worth millions of pounds for events including Ed Sheeran and Adele concerts have been jailed.

Peter Hunter and David Smith traded as Ticket Wiz and BZZ. Over five years BZZ sold tickets for £9.3m more than it paid for them, Leeds Crown Court heard. 

Sheeran's manager Stuart Camp gave evidence after £75 seats for a charity gig were spotted on sale for £7,000.

It is only when you see the astonishing markup this changes from making an honest living to taking the piss, and the judge agreed.

 

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Hunter was jailed for four years and Smith for two and a half years.

It was described by National Trading Standards as a "landmark case" which was "the first successful prosecution against a company fraudulently reselling tickets on a large scale".

Sentencing the pair, Judge Mushtaq Khokhar said: "This was a case of sustained dishonesty for a number of years. 

"A lot of people in this case paid a lot more than they could have paid."

 

This I think is just the very tip of the iceberg, but it has opened the flood gates to similar cases.

 

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In one year, Peter Hunter and David Smith, who are married, bought more than 750 tickets for Sheeran events alone.

They used multiple identities and computer robots to buy tickets, selling them for inflated prices on secondary ticketing websites, including Viagogo, GetMein, StubHub and Seatwave.

Hunter told the jury how he started his business when a friend without a credit card asked him to buy tickets to see Madonna and he realised he could re-sell extra purchases at a huge profit.

We all sell spare tickets when one of our mates drops out at the last minute and most artists I am sure don’t mind this sort of thing. Protection is in place to stop people taking the mick though. 
 

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When their home was raided, investigators found 112 different payment cards in 37 names.

The couple used at least 97 different names, 88 postal addresses and more than 290 email addresses to evade platform restrictions.

Hunter, 51, and Smith, 66, of Crossfield Road, north London, claimed they were a trusted and reliable source of tickets.

The jury found them guilty of three counts of fraudulent trading and one of possessing articles for fraud.

And this is where it fell down for this pair. Made up identities to get them payment cards to buy these tickets in the first place. Pure greed overtook by the looks of it, going through a reported £4 in tickets for over £10.8million in profit. It also shows how easy it is to circumvent controls on these site who take a commission on the sales.
 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-51618744

 

 

 

[Fnige]

3 minutes ago, Phill104 said:

When their home was raided, investigators found 112 different payment cards in 37 names.

The couple used at least 97 different names, 88 postal addresses and more than 290 email addresses to evade platform restrictions.

Yeah thats a lot more than 2

[Tristerin]

This stuff makes me laugh.  Capitalism at its finest.  People don't like it, so lets get the Government involved!  

[Guest]

12 minutes ago, Tristerin said:

This stuff makes me laugh.  Capitalism at its finest.  People don't like it, so lets get the Government involved!  

They broke the law by committing fraud. While I cannot stand these reselling sites as they do flout the law they did not break it. However this couple did. Read the bit about how many identities they used again. The news reports are all stating this really is just one of many who are doing similar, and that in a lot of the cases the resellers are doing next to nothing about it.

[Tristerin]

35 minutes ago, Phill104 said:

They broke the law by committing fraud. While I cannot stand these reselling sites as they do flout the law they did not break it. However this couple did. Read the bit about how many identities they used again. The news reports are all stating this really is just one of many who are doing similar, and that in a lot of the cases the resellers are doing next to nothing about it.

So your problem is with the laws being ineffectual to the crime.  Meaning they aren't afraid to break the law because the gain outweighs the risk.  Long term if they stashed enough money away, this isn't even a blip on the radar of problem because Money = Justice. 

 

Or is your problem with a re-selling website?  That's the capitalism portion I was talking about.  The website will now suffer, cause a judge decided "people didn't HAVE to pay that much"

 

 

[Taf the Ghost]

Eh, the criminal case is landmark because someone was committing fraud and got caught? This has nothing to do with secondary markets where, if the tickets are really clearing at that prices, then the original concert promoters are clearly not pricing the tickets correctly. Now, if the sites use auction-like systems and the couple was using false accounts to keep the prices up, functionally controlling the secondary market, then that's just classic fraud.

 

Or the Judge is a moron, which might really be the story here.

[mr moose]

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Peter Hunter and David Smith, who are married,

Why is their marital status important?

 

They committed fraud got caught, charged and found guilty, why do people have a problem with that?

[divito]

3 hours ago, Tristerin said:

This stuff makes me laugh.  Capitalism at its finest.  People don't like it, so lets get the Government involved!  

So you believe Microsoft and Google's anti-trust verdicts were without merit because, capitalism?

Using falsified information and excess capital forced regular people to pay exorbitant prices they wouldn't normally have to pay.

[greenmax]

5 hours ago, Phill104 said:

What is even worse are touts bulk buying tickets then selling them through these online platforms for huge multiples of the box office price

The original ticket sales company allows them to buy in bulk, Ticketmaster.

[Guest]

7 hours ago, mr moose said:

Why is their marital status important?

 

 

That bit annoyed me too.

[LeSheen]

Most events here in Belgium recommend to only use the site ticketswap. You can only ask for a small markup if you decide to resell your tickets.

I once sold 18 euro tickets , 20 euro after handling fees (because I was ill the night of the event) for the maximum markup and got 25 euros. And I'm pretty sure they give you back your money if the ticket didn't work.

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, LeSheen said:

Most events here in Belgium recommend to only use the site ticketswap. You can only ask for a small markup if you decide to resell your tickets.

I once sold 18 euro tickets , 20 euro after handling fees (because I was ill the night of the event) for the maximum markup and got 25 euros. And I'm pretty sure they give you back your money if the ticket didn't work.

And therein is my issue with sites here in the UK. Markup can be as much as you can get away with all enabled by both the original seller and the reseller. When a gig is sold out in seconds and you find 40% of the tickets have been sold to touts it is frustrating for fans but it is not illegal unless those tickets are for football matches when strangely it is. Most venues and artists put measures in to stop the practice, such as attaching the purchasers name to every ticket. This means they can only be resold through the venue which is fine by me. Certain reseller sites enable people to sell tickets at whatever price they want, and not in small numbers but thousands at a time. We see and hear of cases every week where people have purchased tickets through these sites only to find they are either counterfeit or the tickets are unusable because they have a name attached. This is where the problem starts. Despite taking a commission, the sites take no responsibility for the sales. A customer is not theirs, they are just the enabler so to speak. So the customer has to deal with the seller. The resale site uses GDPR etc to make it almost impossible for the customer to recover their money. The practice leaves a bad taste.

 

If these sites acted like your one in Belgium I would have absolutely no issue with it. That sounds like a great company.

[mr moose]

25 minutes ago, Phill104 said:

And therein is my issue with sites here in the UK. Markup can be as much as you can get away with all enabled by both the original seller and the reseller. When a gig is sold out in seconds and you find 40% of the tickets have been sold to touts it is frustrating for fans but it is not illegal unless those tickets are for football matches when strangely it is. Most venues and artists put measures in to stop the practice, such as attaching the purchasers name to every ticket. This means they can only be resold through the venue which is fine by me. Certain reseller sites enable people to sell tickets at whatever price they want, and not in small numbers but thousands at a time. We see and hear of cases every week where people have purchased tickets through these sites only to find they are either counterfeit or the tickets are unusable because they have a name attached. This is where the problem starts. Despite taking a commission, the sites take no responsibility for the sales. A customer is not theirs, they are just the enabler so to speak. So the customer has to deal with the seller. The resale site uses GDPR etc to make it almost impossible for the customer to recover their money. The practice leaves a bad taste.

 

If these sites acted like your one in Belgium I would have absolutely no issue with it. That sounds like a great company.

 

The whole thing is a mess,   best solution would be to make it illegal to resell tickets without a government confirmed ID.   In Australia second hand dealers must get Drivers license ID  for every item someone tries to sell them.   If they do that and the put that into a computer they'd know straight away who was legit and who had too many tickets.

[yolosnail]

Probably an unpopular opinion, but I think the real issue is that they had to commit fraud to buy all the tickets!

If I want to buy 100 tickets then I should be able to!

If I want to then sell those 100 tickets for 10 times the price then I should be able to.

[mr moose]

11 minutes ago, yolosnail said:

Probably an unpopular opinion, but I think the real issue is that they had to commit fraud to buy all the tickets!

If I want to buy 100 tickets then I should be able to!

If I want to then sell those 100 tickets for 10 times the price then I should be able to.

Sure, let's not bother with market regulation at all and see where it ends up.   Unchecked socialism ends up in communist dictatorships and unchecked capitalism ends up with corporate dictatorships.    Humans are greedy, survivalists and will put themselves before anyone else every time.  If you have no regulation you have no freedom, and as counter intuitive as that sounds that is reality.

[yolosnail]

Just now, mr moose said:

Sure, let's not bother with market regulation at all and see where it ends up.   Unchecked socialism ends up in communist dictatorships and unchecked capitalism ends up with corporate dictatorships.    Humans are greedy, survivalists and will put themselves before anyone else every time.  If you have no regulation you have no freedom, and as counter intuitive as that sounds that is reality.

The thing is though, as far as I'm aware this case is less to do with selling tickets for obscene markups, and more about the fraud in buying the tickets.

So had they legitimately had all those people buying all those tickets, there wouldn't have been any issues

[maartendc]

10 hours ago, Tristerin said:

This stuff makes me laugh.  Capitalism at its finest.  People don't like it, so lets get the Government involved!  

Well, I would say there is nothing inherently wrong with sites like Stubhub. I don't think selling a few tickets at a markup on the free market is a crime (even though morally dubious), but committing fraud IS a crime.

 

But these people used multiple fake identities, credit cards, addresses etc. to bypass restrictions from ticket sellers, etc. That is just straight up fraud. Which is a crime. Which is why they are going to prison.

 

There is a very simple way to weed out these things: just make tickets tied to the buyers' identity, and require photo ID at entrance. If the buyer cannot make it, they could get "store credit" for the purchase price from the original venue / ticket seller. In fact, music festivals in Belgium have been doing this for years, you simply cannot resell those tickets, for this exact reason.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, yolosnail said:

The thing is though, as far as I'm aware this case is less to do with selling tickets for obscene markups, and more about the fraud in buying the tickets.

So had they legitimately had all those people buying all those tickets, there wouldn't have been any issues

 

1. There is no way to legitimately have fake people buy tickets.  And 2, regardless of what they caught these guys for,  your comment was that if you could buy and markup you should be able to, To which I point out that unchecked capitalism will only end in pain.

 

1 hour ago, maartendc said:

If the buyer cannot make it, they could get "store credit" for the purchase price from the original venue / ticket seller.

Or have the original ticket company resell the ticket for a nominal fee to cover the cost of reselling,  then refund the original person in the event it sells.  No third party involved, cheaper tickets all round and every one is guaranteed a genuine ticket.   

 

 

[Dabombinable]

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

 

The whole thing is a mess,   best solution would be to make it illegal to resell tickets without a government confirmed ID.   In Australia second hand dealers must get Drivers license ID  for every item someone tries to sell them.   If they do that and the put that into a computer they'd know straight away who was legit and who had too many tickets.

That's one thing I found out, even when going to trade in (for a new 3ds xl) the second hand 3DS I bought from the very same store. Even with the original receipt, I still had to provide at least my birth certificate as my license was recently expired and no longer a valid form of id (this is QLD, differs between states).

[Delicious Cake]

I guess everyone here saying they did nothing wrong must also think Intel have done nothing wrong with their pricing strategy pre-Ryzen, or that ISP & mobile carriers in the US have done nothing wrong by exploiting their monopoly status, or that the super wealthy are perfectly justified being the ones who pay proportionally the least amount of tax since they can afford to pay lawyers and accountants to hide it.

 

Because hey, that's all capitalism.

[Commodus]

1 hour ago, Delicious Cake said:

I guess everyone here saying they did nothing wrong must also think Intel have done nothing wrong with their pricing strategy pre-Ryzen, or that ISP & mobile carriers in the US have done nothing wrong by exploiting their monopoly status, or that the super wealthy are perfectly justified being the ones who pay proportionally the least amount of tax since they can afford to pay lawyers and accountants to hide it.

 

Because hey, that's all capitalism.

Yeah, not to get too political, but the rah-rah-unfettered-capitalism types here are strange.  Like they enjoy being screwed by companies -- they just wish it would bleed more, maybe give them an STD or two.  That and it feels like they're still stuck in that naive "Ayn Rand is perfection" phase from when they read The Fountainhead at school.

 

Even without the fraud, ticket scalping with such high markups should be illegal.  It's not only putting events out of reach for many people, it's hurting business for the performers, organizers and venue by reducing the chances of filling up seats.

[Bcat00]

As much as i want to say this will help, it doesn't. There are too many pockets involved and i can say for certain this has touched alot of people's wallet. This won't make any waves sadly.

[Sauron]

17 hours ago, Phill104 said:

They broke the law by committing fraud.

That does sound like capitalism at its finest tbf

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

That does sound like capitalism at its finest tbf

I would define it as being the extreme of capitalism just like communism is the extreme of socialism.  Once you have to break/make laws in order to capitalize on something you have gone beyond fair and free trade. 

[Sauron]

18 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I would define it as being the extreme of capitalism just like communism is the extreme of socialism.

That's not the definition philosophers and political scientists use. Communism is a specific form of socialism rather than an extreme version of it.

19 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Once you have to break/make laws in order to capitalize on something you have gone beyond fair and free trade. 

Fair and free trade doesn't really exist in our society and laws change - would this be ok if it were legal?