Ed Sheeran and Lady Gaga ticket tout sentenced to four years in prison

nme.com:

Ed Sheeran and Lady Gaga and re-sell them at inflated prices on secondary ticketing sites such as Viagogo. TQ Tickets sold £6.5million worth of gig tickets between 2015 and 2017, but this does not include the hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of unsold tickets that trading standards officers found when they raided its offices in Dickleburgh, Norfolk.Judge Simon Batiste said Chenery-Woods acted “out of greed” and aimed to “rinse or fleece customers out of as much money as you could”.He went on to explain that TQ Tickets used a file of more than 100 identities to buy tickets from primary selling sites like Ticketmaster.

Some of these identities were a 10-year-old child, a dead relative and others that were completely fake.Judge Batiste added that the firm “created a web of criminality” as they “corrupted” students students and other young people into buying tickets for them.“Some secondary ticketing sites and, indeed, possibly some primary sites, were complicit in what you were doing.

But that provides no mitigation,” he added.Chenery-Woods’ employee Paul Douglas was also jailed for two years and five months.