ITV News and the campaign group FanFair Alliance worked together over a period of three months to find that tickets on the resale site were being sold by three traders, meaning that fewer than 10 per cent of tickets were being sold by ordinary consumers.174 festivals and outdoor events were looked at during the investigation period, totalling 11,000 tickets.
Of those, just over two-thirds were being sold by three traders with a combined face value of approximately £730,000. The total they were attempting to sell them for, however, was much higher at an estimated £1.7million.ITV News questioned how so few traders managed to get their hands on thousands of tickets and found that technically they hadn’t.
Speculative selling, which is illegal, is what these traders were allegedly practicing: selling tickets that they didn’t own to a customer, only to buy them post-sale and then forward the ticket on at a later time.Ed Townend runs a small rock festival in Wales called Cardiff Psych and Noise.
When the publication went to meet him in April 2022, tickets for his event had only just gone on sale.The outlet found that 20 tickets were being advertised by two sellers on Viagogo, which Townend said was a surprise. “It doesn’t make any sense to me because when you look at the backend of our ticket sales, we’ve only sold 14 tickets to the event.”“Total,” he added. “That doesn’t make any sense to me.
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