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Two thirds of touted festival tickets on Viagogo listed by three people, ITV News reports
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 24 August 2022
As the live sector properly started it’s post-COVID revival earlier this year, it seemed certain that the controversies around ticket touting would also return. And so here we go, a new investigation from ITV News reckons that just three people are responsible for listing over two thirds of the UK festival tickets currently available via the often controversial secondary ticketing website Viagogo.
Not only that, but at least one of those sellers has been listing tickets for sale on Viagogo that he hasn’t actually bought yet, based on the assumption that – for all but a few festivals that quickly sell out – he can just purchase a ticket from a primary seller whenever someone buys one of his non-existent but much higher priced tickets on Viagogo. That’s called speculative selling and is against the law in the UK.
ITV News worked with campaign group FanFair on its study of the current touting business and its impact on festival tickets. It reports that FanFair reviewed Viagogo listings for 174 festivals and outdoor events over a three month period and “counted more than 11,000 tickets” that were up for sale.
“Of those”, ITV News says, “just over two thirds were being sold by just three so called ‘traders’, with a combined face value of around £730,000. The total they were attempting to sell them for, though, was much higher – an estimated £1.7 million”.
One of the events for which touted tickets were available was Cardiff Psych And Noise, a small rock festival. ITV News spoke to its promoter in April. Although tickets were on sale for the festival, no line-up had been announced at that point, so only fourteen tickets had actually been sold.
And yet 20 were available on Viagogo. An ITV News reporter bought one of the tickets available on the touting site – at four times more than the face value of that ticket. The seller was a company owned by someone called Marc Stanley.
“A few hours after I made my purchase”, the reporter writes, “a Marc Stanley made his own purchase of one ticket from the organiser of Cardiff Psych And Noise. Shortly afterwards, a ticket with his name on it landed in my inbox”.
Having contacted other festivals for which Stanley was selling tickets – which also said that they couldn’t find any records of having sold any tickets to Stanley or his company – ITV News got in touch with the tout.
“When we visited Marc Stanley at his registered business address he didn’t want to speak to us”, it reports. “But within an hour of our call, all of his listings had mysteriously disappeared from Viagogo’s website”.
Despite National Trading Standards – which has prosecuted touts who have broken the law in the past – expressing concern about what ITV News has uncovered, Viagogo itself insists that its platform remains a safe place to buy tickets, stressing its guarantee that if a tout doesn’t come through with a ticket, a buyer will get a full refund.
Though that obviously doesn’t deal with the fact that the Viagogo platform was being used by a tout that was breaking the law.
Viagogo told ITV News: “We treat concerns about tickets with the utmost priority. In this instance, we acted swiftly to remove the relevant listings and have returned several to the site that have clearly demonstrated that they are legitimate and valid. We continue to review the remaining listings and these remain off site”.
