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Man jailed for reselling football tickets

By | Published on Tuesday 9 August 2016

Ticket touts

A man has been jailed for nine months for illegally re-selling tickets for Premier League and World Cup football games. The prison sentence was handed down because the defendant had breached a previous court order to stop illegally selling tickets to football matches.

Unlike other sorts of tickets, it is a criminal offence to resell tickets to football games without official authorisation in the UK, though it’s not a law that is always enforced. A lack of enforcement, of course, is also a problem with the much lighter regulation that covers other kinds of ticket touting.

David Spanton was previously jailed in October 2012, though mainly for failing to even provide the tickets he was touting, with both music and sporting events involved in that case. In 2013, he was then given a court order requiring him to inform police whenever he purchased tickets or transferred funds.

In the latest court case, he was found to have breached both of those terms, purchasing 173 tickets to 24 Premier League football matches over the course of a year and making over £67,000 in undeclared credit transfers from outside the UK. “Despite the fact that he was given the freedom and opportunity to change his criminal behaviour, Spanton carried on regardless”, Detective Sergeant Rob Tickle, from the Met’s Organised Crime Command, told The Mirror.

In a statement, a Premier League spokesperson said: “Touts profit at the expense of genuine supporters and the unauthorised sale of tickets can lead to fraud and incidents of disorder within stadia. The Premier League works with the Metropolitan Police and other law enforcement agencies to combat the illegal sale of tickets and we strongly encourage supporters to only purchase Premier League tickets directly from their club or official ticketing partners”.



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