C4 Dispatches explores the UKs endemic event ticketing fraud

ever wonder why you couldn't get a ticket to the biggest gigs a dispatchers undercover investigation tells you the real story online ticket companies didn't want you to see the great ticket scandal contains some strong language concerts sold-out sporting events sold-out theatres sold out and even a solo art gallery but hang on if you go online there are lots of tickets for sale some at incredible prices 100 200 300 400 a thousand pounds one single ticket more than 2 grand there's no other way around it really but yeah we've been inside the ticket reselling business and found some shocking reasons why your tickets can cost so so much we're making a lot of money than we ever should to dispatchers reporters have been undercover inside major companies who run what are known as fan to fan ticket exchanges they say their websites where real fans can resell tickets they can no longer use but we found promoters allocating tickets for the biggest gigs to be sold at large markups we have to keep the secret not telling figures like it's really Shady we found professional ticket resellers operating through sites supposedly run for fans I mean all this information we don't know anything about we even found one company buying tickets themselves and then selling them something they claim they don't do that all the credit clothes are falling yeah for the body of the Ticketmaster he hardly at all the reselling of tickets for sold-out gigs infuriates us the fans remember last September when tickets for Coldplay at the o2 arena went on sale fans across the nation had the same experience it sold out fast reportedly within minutes anastasiya Brenna coffe says she tried to get tickets as soon as they went on sale I was on the official website and then there was nothing I tried the o2 nothing again and I thought maybe they're not on sale yet and they had literally just sold out already but soon after she saw tickets for the gig being sold on secondary websites places where people can resell their tickets after about 15 minutes the word tickets on sale on other sites and what were the prices of those tickets anywhere between 85 pounds to probably 200 so I didn't do it it made me feel gutted because not everybody who would like to see them gets to see them and not everybody who wants to see them can afford to see them either so it is pretty upsetting nearly 500 Coldplay fan signed an online petition in complaint the websites which caused this controversy say that the prices are set by the sellers some can be astronomical here is the ticket for the West End play one man to governor's the seat is on the very back row the seller is asking for 400 pounds just one ticket if you into rugby I can do you England versus Ireland at Twickenham the cheaper seat is 400 pounds most expensive a thousand pounds and finally you may want to sit yourself down for this one just one ticket for band of the moment Coldplay 2,292 pounds I mean they're good but - and a bit brand we saw how quickly tickets end up on these sites last October when a one-off Paul McCartney gig went on sale at the Liverpool Echo Arena excited fans camped overnight outside the box office at nine o'clock the sale open and there was a scramble for tickets on the internet - with a reported million hits online lots of fans trying from home were unlucky like Chris Dell man so who sent us this video and I was pressing refresh every few seconds and as soon as it went from not being yet on sale to buy now i clicked to buy a ticket and there was nothing available a phrase some people heard outside the box office - I mean I'm extremely disappointed because that was so close I could have gotten a tape measure and said yeah that close and yet we went online 9:30 that very morning and filmed these two secondary web sites called via gogo and seat wave seat wave already had more than 300 tickets listed from 116 to nearly 1100 pounds plus the seat wave fees my agogo had eight pages of tickets from 125 to over 1,750 pounds the game plus fees chris says he ended up buying one off seat wave and aboard to ticket for the gig for 190 pounds so I ended up paying double so who's selling these tickets and how are they listing them so fast it's hard to know as the sites keep the sellers anonymous but music fan Julie Watson from Glasgow has a hunch three years ago she said she found something strange going on she queued up outside the box office at the Clyde auditorium to guarantee she got a front row seat for Will Young it was a tool promoted by the biggest live events company in the world Live Nation although she says she was first in the queue she got a nasty shock when the box office Dawkins at 9 o'clock the chat behind the desk immediately told us em we couldn't have anything centrally in the first five laws because they weren't available either informed as the reason for this was the fact that tickets are going to a company called via Google which I'd never heard of before so Julie says she looked on the via gogo website and saw the front row tickets listed there for sale they actually had the tickets for the ones that I tried to get that Hornung I think at that point resale and flip a double the face value Julie says she was determined to find out more she bought a 35-pound face price ticket from the via gogo site costing her nearly 60 pounds including fees as it was close to the gig she was told by via gogo to pick it up from the box office and then she saw something strange on the ticket via google his name is actually we have you been expect to see the name of the person who's bought the tickets but how can that be if you open up the via gogo website here it tells you it allows fans to buy and sell tickets but if what Julie says is right front row seats had gone straight to Vigo ago and had been sold to the public at over face value that doesn't seem to add up so what's going on well we went undercover inside via gogo to find out the company says it's Europe's largest ticket exchange selling tens of millions of pounds worth of tickets every year they employ more than 100 staff at their London offices and our undercover reporter Paul has been given a job in customer services he'll be dealing with emails from members of the public who bought tickets sold through the site but first it's a few days of training about how the company works Paul's told some sellers through the site our ordinary fans but he's also told that many tickets are coming from other fans but from another source end time we have patients for example for very because we are must life attend we are getting applications from promoter so we are to sell them on our website without each other say on these ones and say that it's basically yet this isn't how the public has been led to believe that the system works when a big tour goes on sale promoters distribute tickets through what are known as allocations and we're told these allocations normally go to so called the primary ticket agents like Ticketmaster to be sold at face value but this manager is saying that some promoters are also giving allocations to via gogo even though it says it's a site where people buy and sell tickets to each other in a training session with his team leader fools told more we have a whole primary team that deals for girls promoter and menus under the parks office and not have some fields okay she says Paul is not to pass on this information when he's dealing with the public I mean it's really important that we never communicate to anyone that these are cons existed we do have to get okay because that's something internal that the matza poster as far as we're concerned but if exchanging we don't own any tickets okay and he's told what to say if anyone outside the company guesses what may be going on we don't confirm it we don't deny it which is done comment on it just say will speak to the seller look okay all is told via go go has a whole team dedicated to arranging these deals then there's another team which gets the tickets into the office then ships them out while Paul's working at Vigo go a big gig comes up Coldplay at the o2 arena it's promoted by SJM concerts with another promoter or metropolis music and it's the tour which has been causing outrage over how quickly it sold out Paul learns were at least some of the tickets went via gogo had an allocation his team leader shows him the internal accounts the tickets were sold through the accounts are given names of people who work it via gogo for example cold case Ella + merit at Michael okay yeah those are our primary account yeah it's the name on the account which she mentions merit refers to merit bear this is him in the office and he's a senior manager in their primary team later Paul films the listings and transactions for this account as he does his job you can see that lots of allocated tickets for the o2 gig was sold to fans at way over there face value an ordinary seat in the lower tier was face value 65 pounds plus booking fee but via gogo sold them at sometimes more than 200 pounds this person paid five hundred and forty two pounds including fees for two tickets now receipts and they're here at a 271 pounds a ticket well over three times the face value it is an awful lot to pay when you're this far away from the band in the primary count is team leader shoten Paul can see that over 1,800 tickets were sold for nearly two hundred and thirty thousand pounds that's around one hundred and twenty three pounds per allocated tickets after the gig Paul gets further confirmation that the public is not told about allocations like this Coldplay are playing again in 2012 and he finds they have an allocation for this tour too he takes a query from a customer to merit bear a senior manager on the primary team you only are married aren't you the customer wants to know where his seat will be as it's not made plain on the website again Paul is given instructions not to say where the tickets have come from sojanet will Jack we should tell the bio in there do not talk about primary tickets obviously mmm-hmm that these axial occasions will not be available till January okay thank you Christmas is around the corner and the whole team goes from Elim London Paul gets to find out a lot more about how these allocations were a staff chat outside he meets this colleague he says his job is reporting the sales figures for some of these allocations so we'll do what you guys do I won't ever get like prime allocations so to speak Nationals usually live national rascal I guess I am that emoto's yeah live initial arrest really yeah it's usually one of those to Live Nation is the biggest live entertainment company in the world and SJM concerts promoted the Coldplay gig at the o2 arena in December along with metropolis music he explains how the deals work how come they give us tickets cuz we give them a split or something yeah yeah basically we give from like a 90/10 split so they get their face value and they get 90 percent of whatever we make okay at night instead of it yeah then we obviously we get like the 15% booking fee that's ours yeah sorry like it's a we saw when it depends on the allocation if it's like 20 tickets there's no point because you know there's no money in there - yo yo yo 4,000 tickets and get 15% of fatalism yeah the big one the big like this year cold place like how many tickets you get for : starts of the day okay via gogo claim that the prices on their website are not determined by them but by the seller but according to this colleague it's via gogo managers who are setting the prices for thousands of tickets who decides how much they're selling for just play it by ear really like only on sale would just like markup too ridiculous to say because people panic on the on sale like things are sold out immediately the right fiber both all right here but then my overtime that drops down obviously because there's no demand also and then just they just like we have these meetings three or four times a week right about all of our allocations how they're doing and then if I roll we got two thousand visits we've not sold a single ticket we should probably lower the prices by okay he says if sales are going well though they increase the prices whenever they come through sales I get the emails so I know if there's something well to raise the prices whatever joking the artists and the venue's like know about it Wow like I'd say maybe 50% of venues know about it but then a lot of times we have to keep the secret and not tell them because like it's really complicated okay yeah we're making a lot more money than we ever next take that are going back on top we uncover the scale of allocations by agogo has received for some of Britain's biggest acts and we find them using a book of credit cards to buy tickets and then sell them hello they claim they don't do that despatches is investigating an enormous industry the online reselling of tickets our undercover reporter Paul is filming inside one of the biggest companies called via gogo it says it's a fan to fan ticket exchange for people to buy and sell tickets to each other but we found them getting allocations for thousands of tickets from promoters and selling many way over face price after a few weeks of work all volunteers for some overtime and is asked to take a laptop home with him and he sees this document on the system it shows via gogo had an allocation for the V Festival last summer this was organized by SJM concerts along with metropolis music and MCD it shows via gogo were allocated over four and a half thousand tickets the tickets they sold had a face value of six hundred and twenty thousand pounds but they sold them at nearly nine hundred thousand pounds that's a quarter of a million pounds over face value it says nearly all of this eight hundred and eighty four thousand pounds was passed back to the promoter Paul also finds that via gogo had an allocation for the biggest tour in recent times in October 2010 there was a big announcement take that I going back on top demand was huge with people queuing overnight at the box office and bombarding the internet and phone lines stephanie Loxton says she went online the moment they went on sale it was announced yeah yeah their prime was a credit card what happens next I just couldn't get hold of the tickets I was there just before 9 o'clock when the tickets would you two go on sale and there was just no tickets available as so often happens with big gigs the tickets turned up on secondary sites so you go to these other sites and you see take that tickets up for sale for way more than face value what are you thinking when a ticket goes from 50 pounds to 150 200 pounds I have my limits and I just thought this is ridiculous someone's clearly making money out of this and there's a lot of people out there who do like who are you know diehard fans that actually couldn't get to go because of the greed of others Paul finds out what the fans didn't know via gogo had their own allocation for this tour these are some sales for their concert at the Stadium of Light in Sunderland standing and unreserved tickets face value 55 pounds they sold these particular ones for around 100 to 125 pounds each in the accounts Paul sees they sold over 29,000 tickets for three million pounds an average of more than 100 pounds a ticket a long way over the face price at work Paul gets access to another document which reveals more about the scale of allocations now that document was a list of big events mostly for this year in the UK and it says that via gogo has deals to get allocations of tickets for them all it lists nearly 50,000 tickets they've been allocated for 50 well known at music events sporting occasions and the like Strictly Come Dancing among the events are 800 tickets for the live show of the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing it's promoted by Phil McIntyre entertainment and stage entertainment UK and glossa Lee advertised on this website does also on the list 800 tickets for the live tour of The X Factor promoted by 3ei entertainment 2,200 tickets for Rihanna's UK tour and over 3,000 for Westlife's 2012 tour both promoted by Live Nation the biggest allocation of them all it's Coldplay 9,000 tickets for that upcoming stadium tour after we finished filming undercover we went to meet Sharon Hodgson MP now she's been raising concerns over the secondary ticket market ever since she had a bad experience four years ago it all began with my daughter one day trying to find tickets for take that tour and the tickets were all sold out and then continued searching and found some on the secondary market market of quadruple the price up to four hundred plus pounds a ticket the unfairness of it just hit me straight week since then she's been campaigning for more regulation for the resale of tickets we've been under cover in fire go go what we have found out is that for the take that tour last year they were given a direct allocation they got hold of 29,000 tickets they sold them for I think an average of a hundred pounds beyond face value of some of the tickets that it's absolutely disgraceful and I'd be surprised very separate did not um give permission for that to happen because some fans queued for hours and if they thought that there was an allocation being given is just not fair how can the secondary website be given an allocation of tickets directly that the fans understand that the tickets all go on sale to them first they've got even less of a fair chance to get them if some are being given directly to via Google it's just not right we found no evidence that any of the artists are aware of the allocations we approach the promoters of the acts for which we had evidence of allocations Phil McIntyre entertainments and stage entertainment UK confirmed that they had given an allocation for the Strictly Come Dancing tour - via gogo they said that via gogo came well recommended by other promoters in the industry and was selected in good faith Live Nation s gem concerts metropolis music MCD and 3a entertainment are members of the concert promoters Association the association told us it was concerned about the fraudulent listing of non-existent tickets online it said the promoters putting tickets on to the secondary market brought prices down while ensuring that some of the tickets in the market were genuine it said in this respect the secondary market is effectively being used as a premium price primary market for those fans who wish to use it for convenience it said those fans would be happier that the premium went to the artist via the promoter rather than went to a tout while Paul was undercover he found another practice which the public isn't told about via gogo says it's not the seller of tickets on its website and all tickets come from third parties but on the desk of this supply manager Paul spots a book containing credit cards yeah you go Christmas shopping yeah at the Christmas dinner for via go-go staff paul asks him about it justify all the tickets like if we don't have an allocation then we do buy yeah okay which is slightly highly immoral but I'll buy everything and hit like you're reselling it double the price because we just bought optical month 7 by 9 a.m. freestyle comes on I did punish outcomes on sweets get on Ticketmaster and buy them like a non-person what but because we're just your team yeah because that's our job to buy them and then we always get first dibs attentiveness as he works Paul starts to suspect that the transactions where they're just buying and selling tickets themselves go through an account called inventory the next week he asks the same supply manager what the inventory account is all about okay and you must result in Vesely that all the credit flows are fall into when you yeah for the value of the ticket mastery highly Ticketmaster limits the number of tickets you can buy on one credit card to stop bulk buying but the supply manager says via gogo uses a number of credit cards all registered to different addresses to get round the system it's using maximum four six six okay encourages I guess yeah that's why I feel so many so do not realize they're all from the same address all the Penang addresses for the Carters all right houses here they get to the same address and Technology Council actually everyone puts personal adjustment right now is registered to my dad's dress mom's address is really different so okay so you can get double throw the phone we told MP Sharon Hodgson about this that is shameful that is a total misrepresentation of what the agog will see that they do and so now when do people can't get tickets when they go on sale you know you're up against people sitting there were multiple credit cards doing it as a job for a so-called legitimate secondary website it's disgraceful after a couple of weeks undercover Paul is asked to move to a new team okay yeah via gogo describes itself as a fan to fan website and they do have what they call fans or individual sellers who sell a small amount of tickets each but Paul is now joining a team which concentrates on helping another level of Salle's entirely via gogo calls them power sellers or brokers parlors players so they know us and we know them they are names and do them the same people every day the team leader tells him that many of them are large scale operators professional doing it full-time and you have stockin employees and some of them because they have a contact in the venue so they have a contact or they're actually own a box on a certain part for section there are sellers that actually have a primary machine and in the office which is pretty good the Paul is told never to divulge this to the members of the public he's dealing with not even to other colleagues I mean all this information we don't know anything about it whatever man I even like to keep it things that they don't want anyone to another colleague tells them to keep it quiet they're a professional selling through the site just say da say he broke up or yeah every we don't want to do the information event so the professionals in Lausanne yeah it's just exchange it for any video people so just let me say frequent sellers will do the ratings book the Vigo go website doesn't give a breakdown of the kind of sellers who list tickets though it has made some public comments about it this is what via gogo said to a financial website last year the overwhelming majority of sellers on via gogo our ordinary sports and music fans were trying to sell on tickets that they can no longer use well it might be true that the majority of sellers through via gogo are ordinary fans but we've discovered that fans definitely are not responsible for the majority of ticket sales we know this because Paul's team leader showed him the sales figures for November last year the amount of how many how many conductions there were so the biggest thing is positive biggest things parcel is it yeah out of a total of 38 thousand transactions that month eleven thousand were by power sellers ten thousand primary so they were tickets sold by via gogo themselves and only nine thousand were by fans so fans were responsible for less than a quarter of the sales that month secondary websites like via gogo have obligations to be fair with the public under consumer legislation professor Christian twig fleshly specializes in this area of the law I showed him the evidence we've gathered at Vigo go and asked him for his expert opinion what's your action to what you've just seen that I am very surprised by what I've just seen because this seems to be painting a completely different picture from that which is presented to those who go on to via Google and buy tickets and we're go go does it contravene any element of legislation in your view it does yes we don't have a specific legislation on ticket resales but what we do have is a fairly new piece of legislation to protect consumers against all sorts of unfair commercial practices and fair trading practices now in this case we see a lot of evidence that Villagomez involved in misleading practices they're presenting tickets as being supplied by fans when the supply of our Go Go the prices follows tickets are not set by fans but at least in some cases set by by Goga directly a lot of this seems to be misleading commercial practice under these regulations we approached via gogo for their response to our findings they told us via gogo exists to provide a safe secure marketplace for the buying and selling of live event tickets by gogo is an open marketplace and while the majority of sellers are individuals we do not disallow larger sellers including event organizers from selling on our platform above all we provide a guarantee that buyers will get the tickets they have paid for which has helped dramatically reduce ticket fraud and scams in the UK the online resale of tickets at high prices angers lots of fans tell me about Rihanna who tried to get them what nine o'clock in the morning straight away gently yeah there's the site's crash and then you try and get other tickets and that's it yeah when you see tickets exchanging hands or at least being advertised for that sort of price what sort of emotions you have I just think it's ridiculous it kind of promotes people to buy as many tickets as they can of websites not because they want to go because they know they're going to make profit I'm a massive little young fan and I queued up for hours to try and get the tickets I couldn't a ridiculous amount for the ticket I ended up having to pay double the price to a secondary website 50 pounds instead of 25 or 30 next we investigate another website which calls itself a Fanta fan ticket exchange and find professional resellers operate through their website to just recognize it who there who the kind of key sellers are who actually paid on salaries and we find reselling spreading way beyond the traditional rock and pop gigs he told me that they've paid I think it was 1590 pounds four three last night seats which is frightening weird dispatches is investigating so-called fan to fan ticket exchanges which say they're set up for fans to resell tickets to each other but we found promoters allocating thousands of tickets to one website and the same website via gogo using multiple credit cards to buy tickets than selling them to the public at over face price alongside via gogo another company in the UK calls itself the bigger secondary ticketing exchange in Europe seat wave so this has more than a million tickets on its website at any one time and it makes a big claim in its marketing now this is a TV ad brought out by seat wave in 2010 but it's still on my website today if you're looking for tickets or have tickets to sell go to seat wave can't console this man is meant to reflect their typical seller a fan who can no longer get to a gig it's so frustrating I've got these gigs Achatz and now I can't go so when you go on to the seat wave website you are told it's Europe's largest fan to fan ticket exchange an online marketplace where fans that word again can buy and sell tickets so if you're at home going on to this website it would be a fair assumption the sellers of most of their tickets are fans but we had gathered evidence that many of the tickets being sold through their site were coming from professional resellers last summer our second undercover reporter Katie got a job as a part-time ticket agent to find out what was going on her manager is called Leigh Leigh he explains the different kinds of people who sell tickets to see ways kind of categorize in three ways yeah what we call consumer which is one or two times sellers who maybe someone can't go and sell it to kill or sell two tickets so that's what we call consumer setup consumer sellers are what seat wave concentrate on in their adverts last year they said in an interview with Sky News ninety nine percent of people who have ever sold tickets on seat wave have sold fewer than five tickets but the lake admits they have two more categories besides the consumers which they don't have mitt to in their marketing then we have what you call like pro sellers so these guys would be maybe someone who worked work somewhere else full-time bank or wherever and actually selling quite a lot tickets thing and then have brokers who just start to get to their job so are they touts probably some form of tout yet maybe on lines house he may explain that these professional sellers or touts rather are important to the company sounds like I've got the links with the broker so I'm just constantly something speaking to people saying what sent me this seven that service yeah just recognize a few there who the kind of key Salazar those are the people who are constantly like wanting to get stuff off him he's showing a little bit of luck yeah although they might be a pain of the arts but actually paying our salaries okay if they don't put their tickets up we don't sell them if we'd outside it tickets we doubt that in the Commission Lee Lake has been at the center of some controversy in 2008 the o2 arena banned him from their premises after they found him handing out tickets to buyers for a Coldplay gig they found he had bought the tickets using multiple credit cards and multiple addresses and they'd been sold through the seat wave website seat wave told the media that Lee Lake had bought the tickets but it was only in case the company needed to replace missing tickets for customers but on Katie's first day Lee Lake tells her something which the public wasn't told just about me I've been over here workings about been off his so before that I was doing tickets on the side so I kind of got bored with my job in man got to no guy here cuz I seven tickets receipt wait yeah and then continue doing that so I still kind of sell lots of tickets which kind of makes me know about the job Katie starts work in the last-minute ticket section she's part of a system under which people can continue to sell their tickets through the site right up to the day of an event as long as they bring them into the office she's told lots of tickets for last year's take that two were bought up by brokers and they ended up trying to sell them at the last minute you mentally there's been a few how come there were so many last-minute tickets take that just means yeah and I think brokers alive the bro that you know something as massive as that there just by hundreds and hundreds of tickets yeah and then they just have too many in it you know I was bloob innings of forty fifty ticket tonight on Friday and Saturday there was like maybe five or six tickets there but there was one night that I came back with a folder full of tickets and they're all unsold and it's like sweetie they just buy loads of tickets but they make so much money on the ones that they settled it oh yeah and it make a profit anyway it doesn't matter and it's this colleague who's been assigned to show her the ropes as he's been doing the job for a few months at lunch lady asks him about the branding of seat wave as Fanta fans not Fanta fan as if it's brokers he says when they deal with the public they don't tell them that they're buying from big sellers yeah you say well we don't know we're just we literally just see computers that's in the middle of it if they wanted to name them you sighs you wouldn't go oh he sounds low recently this video surfaced on YouTube it shows the CEO of seat wave Joe Cohen presenting to colleagues and investors at an Internet industry conference in 2010 and here he gives a makeup of the sellers on see one of the economics and in the makeup of our sellers we've got large brokers who are where people are taking vast amounts of supply and inventory selling tickets professionally the figures say brokers lists over two-thirds of the tickets on seat wave and make up nearly half of the sales and another category of seller isn't fans either we've got consumer sellers and then we've got event organizers who are trying to yield manage and sell unsold inventory as well within our exchange so ticket sales by fans who they call consumers are a minority they sell just over a third of the tickets but when you go on the seat wave website you're not given any of these figures the website just says anyone is free to sell the jitter mat tickets on seat wave it gives no details of who the Salizar and there's no mention of brokers or event organizers we showed our evidence to Professor twig Flettner and asked his opinion on what we'd found so there you go seat wave claiming to be Europe's largest fan to fan ticket exchange what did you see something that doesn't seem to be involving a great deal of Fanta fun exchanging but rather business to fun exchanges we see that less than half of the tickets sold are from real fans we're seeing that the majority of tickets come from professional outfits once again consumers are being misled that is clearly not acceptable under consumer protection rules Caty only worked for nine days at seat wave her undercover role was compromised and she was fired last month seat wave changed their branding so their logo no longer says fan to fan but the fan to fan description is still on their website and they still carry their advert on the site we approached seat wave for their response to our evidence seat wave denied that they had breached any consumer regulations its CEO Joe Cohen told us seat wave was set up five years ago to help fans get better access to events at market-based prices and have complete peace of mind that the money they were spending on tickets was secured along the way we have led the industry in the areas of consumer protection and transparency and we will continue to lead the way in providing fans better access to the events that they are passionate about we will continue to do so in a fair and transparent way the resale of tickets online is now thought to be worth up to a billion pounds a year and the activities of resellers are branching out from the traditional rock and pop gigs last year the National Gallery's leonardo da vinci exhibition sold out with people queuing round the block for on the day tickets but the gallery publicly complained about resale websites after the 16 pound tickets were being advertised online for hundreds of pounds reselling has even reached that great British institution the last night of the Proms Peter Robinson makes a huge effort to get a ticket when the proms go on sale every year he takes the first train from Ipswich to London and queues at the box office from 8:00 in the morning it's not just the music it's the people you meet it's one big picnic Peter was lucky and got a ticket last year but many didn't they had to queue for hours on the last night itself the first-come first-served standing tickets and some were turned away as it was full the tickets were changing hands online for huge markups Peter spoke to the person sitting next to him and he said to me guess how much we paid so I said two to three hundred then he just went at it four hundred he went he told me that they paid I think it was fifteen hundred and ninety pounds for three last night seats which is frightening really the problems are the crown jewels over of our music season and I believe they should be protected but people are making big money out of it reg Walker is an independent consultant who specializes in security for major venues around the country one of his jobs is to tackle the unlicensed resale of tickets he says the online market has transformed the traditional face of the street corner tout since the advent of the internet it's become much more of a cold cynical harvesting of tickets for events with the use of limited companies multiple credit cards in multiple names it may be done by sending people's the various box offices it's an industrial scale and in my opinion it simply is immoral unethical and disadvantages the very people in society that cannot afford to pay for the notes or tickets it's currently legal to resell a ticket online unless it's for football or the Olympics five years ago a House of Commons Select Committee considered whether the secondary market should be regulated Joe Cohen of seat wave and Eric Baker CEO of via gogo went before the committee and defended the secondary market as being in the interests of the consumer the committee decided against regulation but MP Sharon Hodgson is one politician who thinks that time has come to look again at the industry last year she tried to bring in a private member's bill to restrict lis selling well what I want is that these tickets can only be resold it's a face value plus a small percentage so anybody with the ticket you know for an event and defined the can go there would be able to resell it on the secondary website but if you take the profit out people won't deliberately buy them all in huge numbers in order to resell in a profit while Paul was undercover at via gogo its founder and chief executive eric bakker came to give a talk to all the staff this is the year that we clearly establish that were dominant player here if we continue to deliver I'm you know doing the deals as developing a product not where we want to own the entire world so Paul asks him about Sharon Hodgins bill yes I heard that there was a law which was potentially going to be passed about resale of tickets above 10% of their face value in this country about the same as the odds of you turning on your telly and seeing me playing keeper for Chelsea and I don't even play soccer every local place that we go into is the same script these people get upset first they say well this is illegal we say no no we actually read the law those words have been fought the law is not changing in this country thanks last month in the House of Commons Sharon Hodgins bill was dropped but she says she is not going to give up hopefully the reaction from this program will horrify the public and this would certainly support my campaign for seeing that the time is now come that we need to legislate and do something about this now as of this week the secondary web sites were still very much open for business even tickets for Channel 4's Comedy Gala in aid of Great Ormond Street Hospital have been listed on some of the secondaries between 65 and 700 pounds and that was within a few hours of them going on sale but during our undercover investigation we did find one way to get hold of a ticket at the end of a working day via gogo had failed to sell a couple of tickets so Paul and his colleagues what them for free you have two tickets left Gary Barlow Elaine is it tonight all right I can't go tonight oh it's Gary Barlow though yeah cool face awesome so if you want to get a good seat don't bother logging on work inside a secondary ticket exchange

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Views: 51,072

Rating: 4.7674417 out of 5

Keywords: uk ticketing industry fraud, viagogo, secondary ticketing, scam, fraud, scalping, ticketmaster, livenation

Id: tgW9n04aqfo

Length: 47min 5sec (2825 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 01 2012