A small number of industrial level touts are together speculatively listing thousands of tickets for sale on secondary ticketing platform Viagogo, tickets connected to specific seats that are still available on Ticketmaster at less than half the price.
A new study undertaken by campaign group the FanFair Alliance last weekend found that one reseller, listed as Diana Rebchenko in Ukraine, is currently selling 1762 tickets on Viagogo, most of them for seats that can still be booked on primary sites at a much lower price.
FanFair was able to track the speculative selling because, under UK consumer rights law, a seller is obliged to list the seat number a ticket is attached to, which means tickets being touted can be compared to the tickets still on sale on the primary sites.
That said, this tracking wasn’t possible in all cases, because some of the tickets listed broke this rule and didn’t list seat numbers. That included another seller officially based in Ukraine, Khomin Yarco, who is currently listing significant volumes of seated tickets to UK arena shows.
“Given the current political scrutiny of online ticket touting, this snapshot of speculative ticketing on Viagogo is alarming”, FanFair’s Adam Webb tells CMU. “Effectively, a small handful of overseas traders are using the website to profiteer and resell huge volumes of tickets that are readily available at face value on Ticketmaster and other primary ticketing platforms. And this is likely only the tip of the iceberg”.
While most aspects of for-profit ticket touting have been heavily criticised over the years, speculative selling - where a tout advertises a ticket they don’t have yet - is particularly controversial.
The reseller may be able to secure the specific ticket they have sold from the primary seller after they have found a buyer on Viagogo, but that can't be assured. And even if they do get the tickets they've ordered, the buyer could have bought the same tickets at the same time from the primary platform at a much cheaper price, if only they knew where to look.
So, for example, a ticket for seat E28 for a Black Stone Cherry Show at the OVO Hydro in Glasgow next Wednesday is simultaneously on sale on Ticketmaster and Viagogo, for £55.65 and £100 respectively, with Viagogo’s booking fees also higher. Which means the tout can’t possibly have the specific ticket they are selling, despite Viagogo supposedly prohibiting speculative selling of this kind.
Where the speculative seller can’t access the specific ticket they have sold, they may offer the buyer an alternative ticket for the same show. However, this offer may be made at the last minute when the buyer, desperate to see the show, has no choice but to accept what may be an unfair alternative.
For example, CMU’s own investigations show numerous reviews on Trustpilot from people who bought tickets on Viagogo and who were then contacted by email or WhatsApp just hours before the show to be told the tickets they had purchased were no longer available.
In some cases those ticket buyers were offered inferior tickets at the same price - standing tickets when they had bought seated tickets, for example - with Viagogo customers saying that sellers were likely aware that they had paid for travel or hotels by that point, so would be forced to accept the tickets.
One Trustpilot reviewer who described themselves as disabled said that they were sold two tickets which were described as stalls tickets “with a photo of the seats”, only to be contacted five hours before the concert to be told that the tickets were, in fact, standing tickets and that they would need to meet the seller outside the venue.
Another ticket buyer purchased tickets for her daughter who was recovering from a dislocated knee - again, seated tickets were bought, but at the last minute the seller said that those tickets were not available and offered cheaper standing tickets.
Speculative selling was criticised multiple times in a recent Parliamentary debate on the secondary market. Emma Foody MP, who instigated that debate, said the practice “can lead to dire consequences, with fans thinking they have secured tickets, only to find that they have been misled”.
“Despite consumers being assured that protections are in place”, she added, “it appears that some sellers remain able to circumvent protections, with the consumer paying the price and experiencing the double whammy of missing out and losing out financially”.
In the same debate, Anneliese Midgley MP noted that recommendations for new ticket resale regulations “made by the Competition And Markets Authority in 2021, particularly around speculative selling, remain unaddressed”. These issues, she added, “deserve serious consideration, as they place further strain on fans who are already facing inflated prices at the primary level”.
Earlier this year two people involved in a now defunct touting operation called TQ Tickets were found guilty of fraudulent trading following an investigation by National Trading Standards.
NTS said at the time that speculative selling was fraudulent, with a spokesperson saying that “the defendants engaged in fraudulent trading by listing tickets for sale on secondary ticketing websites that they had not purchased and did not own”.
“Known as ‘spec selling’, the idea was to induce consumers to agree to ‘buy’ non-existent tickets - with false information about the seats and row numbers - at an inflated price”.
In the case of TQ Tickets, it was not just the speculative selling itself that broke the law, but also - as NTS explained - “when they couldn’t fulfill the purchases, the defendants tried to cover it up by … sending empty or torn envelopes to make it appear as if the tickets had been sent and lost in the post”.
Speculative selling is sufficiently frowned upon that it is technically banned on Viagogo. The resale platform told CMU earlier today, “Our policies prohibit speculative listings. Cooperation with the broader industry is critical in helping identify these listings and curtailing the practice”.
Urging anyone in the industry that identifies speculative listings to alert the company, Viagogo said any such listing would be removed and “sellers found to be in breach of our policy face consequences including fines and removal from the platform”.
FanFair’s review of tickets being sold on Viagogo last weekend discovered a small group of foreign sellers were behind listings for 2800 tickets at just ten shows across a variety of UK venues, including Massive Attack, Sepultura, Cyndi Lauper, Strictly Come Dancing, Cirque Du Soleil and Mrs Brown’s Boys.
On further analysis, the campaign group said that the same group of sellers appeared to be speculatively listing tickets for hundreds of other UK shows across the platform - accounting for a substantial percentage of all tickets being listed on Viagogo’s UK website.
Other sellers included Iveta Zimanova from Slovakia, Vladyslav Khomenko from Germany, Tigran Ambartsumian from Ukraine, Sam Clover from North America, MRP-FZCO from Dubai. According to FanFair, like Diana Rebchenko, they were all selling batches of tickets for seats that could still be booked at half the price via the primary platforms.
FanFair adds that all the sellers scrutinised in its study enjoy ‘trader’ status on Viagogo and are supposedly ‘trusted suppliers’ to the website. That means they have all sold more than 100 tickets through the website in the past year and Viagogo will be aware of their true identities.
With this in mind, Webb continues, “these findings raise many serious questions for Viagogo about their business practices. Despite the trail of controversies surrounding this company, some of their biggest suppliers appear to be listing thousands of tickets that they either don’t actually possess or in ways that breach UK consumer protection law. The entire website feels like it is out of control. We will be sending our findings to both the CMA and the government and urging them to take action”.
In terms of what action the government should take, FanFair’s current position is that the UK should follow the lead of Ireland, France and Australia and “outlaw the resale of tickets for profit”, while ensuring that the industry provides capped resale options for fans who genuinely can’t attend a show at the last minute.