You may be denied access to an event if you purchased a ticket from a promotional or resale website, if the ticket says “no resale” or if it is a fake ticket. In these circumstances, you would claim a breach of contract against the seller to recover your costs. I recommend checking the terms and conditions on your tickets or booking information for the event you wish to attend. If it is a real ticket and the reason for the refusal of entry does not comply with the conditions indicated, you can argue that the venue or the organizers have broken the contract by denying you entry, and you may be able to sue them for a refund. However, according to Kaboodle, putting names on banknotes is not always the right approach. It`s harder for people to book tickets for large groups and just hand them out to their friends. “Especially when it comes to dance music: we know people will come in large groups, and when they book, they won`t necessarily know who will come,” Holmes says. Based on research, we estimate that 90+% of tickets are listed on the resale platforms of “merchants” (those who sell more than 100 tickets per year). Jourdan, A. (2016). “Scalped: In China`s squeaky hospitals, illegal ticket advertisers defy crackdown,” Reuters www.reuters.com/article/us-china-healthcare-scalpers-idUSKCN0X82O1 April 12. And after 2-3 seconds, £35 tickets were sold for £102, £117, £125, £210 (!!!!) on the Viagogo website.

“The most successful reseller sites have the biggest advertisers working for them – and very often, they are smugglers who engage in unethical and illegal practices,” says Adam Webb, campaign director at FanFair Alliance, a group that campaigns against online ticketing. Large resale platforms struggle to attract the biggest advertisers who can sell the most tickets. They`re your team`s star players — and the best way to attract them is to simplify sales and not ask them too many tough questions about where all the tickets come from. One of those beliefs was Terence Shepherd, the director of online ticketing operation Xclusive. Xclusive “sold” but failed to deliver thousands of tickets worth millions of pounds for events such as the Beijing Olympics and summer 2008 music festivals. The company then collapsed, leaving more than 10,000 people without tickets. In July 2011, Shepherd was sentenced to eight years in prison for fraudulent trafficking, money laundering and acting as a business executive while being disqualified. Behr, A., & Cloonan, M.

(2020). “Left? Concert tickets, vanting and cultural value,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 26(1): 95-108 Electronic music artists, venues and promoters are not doing enough to protect fans from online smugglers who sell tickets for more than 10 times face value as the industry emerges from the Covid-19 pandemic, according to experts identifying attacks against ticketing systems. Earlier this summer, UK festivals and major electronic music events sold out quickly as tickets were released before Covid-19 restrictions were eased, restricting gatherings since March 2020. If you would like to discuss practical measures to curb online ticket advertising, please contact info@fanfairalliance.org. Technology plays an important role in ticket advertising in the twenty-first century: the existence of secondary ticketing websites and other online marketplaces facilitates transactions between consumers and advertisers, while digitization enables questionable ticket harvesting methods such as bots and the use of multiple identities to circumvent ticket limits (Behr and Cloonan 2020:100). Despite the steps taken to avoid this, research suggests that ticketing websites are almost twice as likely to experience malicious bot traffic as in all sectors with an online presence (Imperva 2019:2; Duffy, Reid, & Finch, 2020: 184). Significantly, bots artificially increase demand for tickets by rapidly closing a high volume of transactions and purchasing tickets from primary sources before human consumers can, forcing them to engage with advertisers to buy tickets (Imperva 2019: 7, 9; Behr and Cloonan 2020:100). Bots can also analyze market conditions by collecting or “scraping” information such as current availability and demand to then inform advertising strategies (Imperva 2019:6). Legislation banning the use of robots has also been introduced in places that otherwise have not implemented large-scale anti-soliciting measures, such as in the United Kingdom and at the supranational level of the European Union (Behr and Cloonan 2020: 102; Lunny, 2019). Section 53 of the VCRA 2006 amended Section 166 of the CJPOA, 1994 and extended the blocking of ticket tugs. It is now a criminal offence: in November 2017, the Competition and Markets Authority intensified its crackdown on resale sites by taking enforcement action against four of the largest secondary ticketing sites: Seatwave, Viagogo, Get Me In and StubHub.

This led three of the sites to offer formal commitments to review the way they do business, but Viagogo ignored CMA`s efforts to introduce reforms. Most people underestimate the scale of the operations and the amount of money smugglers make, according to Webb. “The scam of British ticket buyers is unbelievable,” he says. “Over the past six years, hundreds of millions of pounds of tickets have been improperly sold to people. That`s crazy. This was prohibited under the Violent Crime Reduction Act of 2006, which basically stated that using creative methods to circumvent the 1994 law wasn`t really important either, and that it could be a criminal offense if you were involved in smart price inflation and sold free tickets. There is also a conflict of interest between Google and ticket resale sites, according to Webb. Often, resale sites like Viagogo appear on Google Search above the official main ticket sellers because they pay more for Google advertising. In addition to the problem of ticket sellers using resale sites, selling fake tickets via social media is becoming a growing problem. Tim Holmes is responsible for the commercial operations of the ticketing company Kaboodle.

The platform manages ticket sales for London`s Printworks and The Drumsheds, as well as several festivals. Holmes believes that the number of fake tickets sold to fans through platforms like Facebook has increased significantly. The decision paved the way for the enforcement of ticket restrictions through criminal law, which will expand the avenues available to deter ticket advertisers in the future. The practice of ticket advertising includes a variety of sourcing and resale methods that influence the perceived legitimacy of the practice and its il/legality and non-ethical (see Ledeneva 2018; Drayer and Martin, 2010: 47). On the purchasing side, the most unethical and largely illegal forms of ticket acquisition for advertising purposes – the use of automated bots and the sale of fraudulent tickets – constitute cybercrime, while the least controversial transactions are simple resales at face value, which are generally not presented as advertising and not illegally. There are a variety of potential gray areas in ticket advertising, and this ambiguity is exacerbated by the various laws and regulations around the world. France and Japan have each passed far-reaching anti-solicitation laws, while in the United Kingdom, the unauthorized resale of tickets for football matches is illegal and yet there are no such provisions for other types of events (Cooke 2018; Behr and Cloonan 2020:98-9). Imperva (2019). How bots affect ticketing www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/how-bots-affect-ticketing/ Industrial-scale ticket advertising hurts music companies and the music industry as a whole, diverting millions of pounds into the back pockets of advertisers and secondary platforms.