When a judge dismissed an appeal by prolific ticket tout Peter Hunter and his husband and accomplice David Smith against their landmark conviction for fraud, he sounded an alarm.
The evidence, he said in a 2021 judgement, suggested the possibility of “connivance and collusion” between ticketing companies and touts, who buy up tickets for live events in bulk and sell them to the public at inflated prices.
A different judge sentencing another group of ticket touts for fraud, including the self-styled “Ticket Queen” Maria Chenery-Woods, last year raised similar concerns and suggested the possibility some ticketing sites had been “complicit” in the touts making “substantial profits” by reselling tickets.
Hunter fraudulently traded tickets between 2010 and 2017, Chenery-Woods between 2012 and 2017. They both used all of the four big UK ticket resale sites: StubHub, Viagogo and the Ticketmaster-owned GetMeIn! and Seatwave.
For years, fans had battled touts to get the tickets they wanted and to avoid heavy mark-ups on resale sites. Meanwhile, Ticketmaster had publicly insisted that it was trying to combat ticket touting, which can be illegal in some circumstances.
The company – one of the UK’s biggest ticket sellers – was in a unique position until 2018, as a ticketing website which also owned two major resale platforms.
Although Ticketmaster was not involved or represented in either of these court cases, the judges’ comments about the industry suggested that the full story may not yet have been told. We wanted to investigate what was going on before the company shut its resale sites in 2018.
We spoke to former and current ticketing staff, who enjoyed working for Ticketmaster but in some cases were concerned that fans might have been short-changed. We also spoke to promoters, venue managers and consultants, and combed through court transcripts.
What we heard was that ticket touts had inside help with their business buying and selling tickets from the ticketing platforms they used:
Former staff at resale sites which Ticketmaster used to own told us they worked closely with touts, and court documents at Chenery-Woods’ trial revealed two staff at those companies bought tickets for touts
Touts trading huge volumes of tickets were offered financial “incentives” by resale sites, Hunter alleged during his trial
Email evidence in court suggested one tout was offered a meeting with a top Ticketmaster lawyer to “brainstorm” ways the company could help them
Other former Ticketmaster employees told us they were asked to develop software to help touts sell tickets in bulk on resale sites
Ticketmaster said in a statement that the allegations refer to “companies that were dissolved in 2018 and alleged events from over a decade ago, which have no relevance to today’s ticketing landscape”.
“Revisiting outdated claims about long-defunct businesses only serves to confuse and mislead the public,” the company said.
It added that Ticketmaster has “no involvement in the uncapped resale market” now and said: “We have always been committed to fair and secure ticketing.”
When reselling tickets becomes a crime
Hunter and Chenery-Woods were not the kind of touts who stand outside a venue discreetly asking passers-by to buy or sell tickets. These two turned their spare rooms into registered, tax-paying companies and made millions from trading tickets online, the courts found.
Mike Andrews, who leads National Trading Standards’ e-crimes unit and was involved in the investigation into Hunter and the Ticket Queen, told the BBC how he joined the early morning raid on the anonymous townhouse in a tree-lined north London street where Hunter ran his operation.
Upstairs was a room filled with PCs, whirring away, buying and selling tickets. “It was obviously an operation that ran pretty much 24/7,” Mr Andrews said. They also found rolls of tickets in seat-number order for events such as Lady Gaga concerts and the Harry Potter play, and multiple credit cards.
Reselling tickets for profit for live performances in the UK is not illegal. But Hunter and Chenery-Woods were convicted of using fraudulent practices to get around restrictions – such as limits on the number of tickets an individual can buy.
They pretended to be lots of different people, using lots of different credit cards, when they bought the tickets from companies such as Ticketmaster, See Tickets or AXS – which are known as primary ticketing websites.
The Ticket Queen used the details of family members, including a dead relative, to buy tickets, as well as using the names and addresses of dozens of people in and around the town of Diss, Norfolk where her business operated.
To sell the tickets, the touts used resale sites, which are known as the secondary ticketing websites.
The ‘VIP’ touts who made millions for resale sites
Touts were “working hand-in-hand with resale platforms”, Mr Andrews told us.
A former staffer at Ticketmaster-owned Seatwave, who asked to remain anonymous, told us touts were “VIPs” on the resale site. “They were doing a lot of business for us. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions.”
Some staff at Seatwave had a cosy relationship with touts, according to the former employee, who said he would take Paul Douglas – the Ticket Queen’s former brother-in-law, also convicted of fraud – out for a pint when he visited London.
Resale sites make their money from fees paid by buyers and commission from the sellers – court papers show these could be as much as 25% of the resale price. Prosecutors calculated that Hunter’s company received sales revenue of £26.4m over about seven-and-a-half years. Based on their typical commission, the UK’s four main resale sites could have received £8.8m between them from Hunter’s sales alone.
