A BBC investigation has revealed that Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster offered prolific touts - who were later jailed - meetings with Selina Emeny, the company’s International Group Counsel and a director of 193 companies associated with the entertainment giant, to help “brainstorm” ways the company could help them.
The investigation, conducted by BBC journalists Chi Chi Izundu and James Stewart, uncovered evidence of what judges in fraud cases involving ticket touts described as “connivance and collusion” between ticketing companies and prolific touts who made millions illegally trading tickets.
Email evidence presented in court showed that in 2015, a senior GetMeIn! executive invited one of those prolific touts, Peter Hunter, to meet with Emeny. Hunter was subsequently jailed for fraud in 2021.
GetMeIn! was a ticket resale platform - or ‘secondary ticketing website’ - owned by ‘primary ticketing’ operator Ticketmaster, which also operated another secondary ticketing site, Seatwave, until bailing on the resale business in the UK in 2018.
“The proposed meeting in 2015 was intended to ‘address any worries’ Hunter might have about a change in the law around ticket resale and ‘brainstorm what more can be done by our legal team to help UK brokers’”, the BBC reports. Emeny, an SRA-regulated solicitor, apparently remains active in her role at Live Nation despite these revelations - though her LinkedIn profile currently returns a 404 error.
The BBC investigation was prompted by comments from two separate judges in fraud cases who suggested “connivance and collusion” between ticketing companies and touts. When sentencing Maria Chenery-Woods, known as the ‘Ticket Queen’, last year, the judge raised concerns that some primary ticketing sites had been “complicit” in touts making “substantial profits” when reselling tickets.
Hunter’s company generated £26.4 million in revenue over seven and a half years, with prosecutors calculating that resale sites could have earned £8.8 million in commission from his operations alone. Despite these touts being convicted of fraud, there is no indication that Ticketmaster has returned its commissions to the ticket buyers - something the company almost certainly has the data to be able to do.
The BBC’s year-long investigation revealed multiple ways in which Ticketmaster’s resale platforms allegedly supported large-scale touts:
- Staff at GetMeIn! and Seatwave bought tickets on behalf of touts, with one employee receiving £8,500 for this work.
- Technical teams developed software specifically to help touts sell tickets in bulk.
- Senior executives allegedly provided weekly tip-offs about upcoming sales before public announcements.
- Touts were offered financial incentives, including £4000 cashback for reaching sales targets.
- Credit card company American Express allegedly offered unlimited cards to help circumvent purchase restrictions.
Ticket touting - or ticket scalping, as it’s known in the US - is not in itself illegal in the UK. However, the convicted touts used multiple identities to circumvent rules on primary ticketing sites that restricted how many tickets each person could buy for any one show. Which is why they were guilty of fraud.
The touts also engaged in ‘speculative selling’ - listing tickets for sale that they did not actually own. This practice involves advertising tickets at inflated prices before having secured them, gambling on being able to purchase them later at face value. Consumers believe they are buying guaranteed tickets when in reality they are paying inflated prices for tickets that may not exist. This violates resale platforms’ terms and conditions, which typically require sellers to actually own the tickets they list.
Former Ticketmaster employees told the BBC that despite the company claiming its resale platforms operated as “separate entities”, GetMeIn! And Seatwave shared infrastructure, directors and office space with Ticketmaster - meaning the company could have identified and stopped touts if it had chosen to.
Speaking to CMU today, Adam Webb from campaign group FanFair said, “Although the BBC’s investigation focuses on historic offences, it highlights again, beyond any doubt, the corrupt and fraudulent heart of so-called secondary ticketing. The fundamental business model of ‘uncapped’ ticket resale platforms is unchanged. These businesses remain utterly dependent upon large-scale touts”.
Webb added that the UK government’s commitment to introduce new measures to regulate ticket resale should be accelerated: “FanFair hopes they will help accelerate the introduction of a price cap on ticket resale. This simple common sense measure is widely supported, and would be the quickest and most effective way of protecting consumers from exploitation”.
Matt Kaplan, Director Of UK/EU at Tixel, a ticket resale platform that already operates with a price cap, told CMU: “Every pound that is sunk into an inflated resale ticket is a pound that fan is not spending at the merch tent, over the bar, or on buying a ticket to another event. It is lining the pocket of scalpers and the platforms that enable them and we fiercely condemn the practice of ticket scalping and anyone that enables it”.
While Ticketmaster closed GetMeIn! and Seatwave in 2018 - months after Hunter was charged - and now caps resale prices at face value on its main platform, the fundamental issues in the wider secondary ticketing market persist. Notably, other major resale platforms including Viagogo and StubHub continue to operate in the UK market.
The BBC investigation focused specifically on the historic practices at Ticketmaster’s now-defunct resale sites, but questions remain about relationships between large-scale sellers and the secondary ticketing platforms that still exist today. Both Viagogo and StubHub told the BBC they have measures in place against fraud and support legal action against bad actors.
However, within minutes of Beyoncé’s pre-sale starting in February for her UK tour, hundreds of tickets appeared on these resale sites at inflated prices, suggesting the fundamental problems persist.
National Trading Standards lead investigator Mike Andrews told the BBC that despite measures supposedly in place to prevent touts buying large numbers of tickets, “it’s quite evident that that practice took place then and still takes place now”.
Trading Standards led on the investigations that resulted in the convictions of Hunter and Chenery-Woods, However, Andrews added that his unit lacks resources to pursue further prosecutions.
The regulatory response to ticket touting has been notably fragmented. While Trading Standards successfully prosecuted individual touts for fraud, the Competition and Markets Authority investigated the resale platforms themselves but took no enforcement action - a disconnect that may have allowed these practices to flourish unchecked.
Ticketmaster told CMU, “Ticketmaster UK has no involvement in the uncapped resale market. We have always been committed to fair and secure ticketing. That’s why we support the current government’s proposals to introduce a cap on ticket resale prices – something we have enforced at Ticketmaster since 2018”.
The BBC investigation, it added, “refers to companies that were dissolved in 2018 and alleged events from over a decade ago, which have no relevance to today’s ticketing landscape. For example, back then, digital tickets didn’t even exist. Revisiting outdated claims about long-defunct businesses only serves to confuse and mislead the public”.
Of course, another ongoing government discussion that Live Nation has been involved in relates to a proposed £1 levy on largescale shows to support the grassroots live sector. Early this year the government’s Minister for the Creative Industries, Chris Bryant MP said that Live Nation “could sign up 100% and help in relation to Ticketmaster and in relation to any of the acts they are representing. They have been part of the conversation and we’re having a bit more of the conversation here now”.
Given the revelations about the huge commissions earned from fraudulent touting operations, perhaps Live Nation could demonstrate its commitment to the UK music industry by donating these historic profits to the LIVE Trust, which was established to support all participants in the grassroots live music sector, including artists and promoters…
Read the full BBC investigation at BBC News
