Ticket touts - something needs to be done

However it also gives a certain group of people a chance to make their quick bucks ahead of the festive period.

Ticket touts have been the thorn of the entertainment and sporting industry for decades, snapping up all the tickets and forcing true fans into parting with hundreds of pounds way over the face value price.

I myself was a victim of this just this weekend when Britain's best loved comedian Peter Kay announced he would be going on tour for the first time in eight years.

Kay is a household name in the country and the scramble for tickets was always going to be a chaotic one at 10am on Sunday morning.

The tickets were an ideal present for my parents, who themselves are massive fans of the Bolton born comic.

However for an hour I faced a painstaking wait to be successful, sitting in queues on a number of sites before in the end I accepting defeat.

When looking on ticket sell on sites such as StubHub and Viagogo, I was astonished to see some tickets going for treble the price, some up to £300, and this was when some tickets were still on general sale.

To say I was angry was an understatement. I consider myself a big Kay fan and I had been beaten to tickets by greedy touts hoping for a big pay packet ahead of Christmas.

One fan on Twitter revealed two tickets were up for sale on StubHub for £1,024. An absolute disgrace in my eyes.

Fans were calling for Kay to take a leaf out of pop star Ed Sheeran's book, who took the issue to touts who snapped up 10,000 tickets for his tour in July.

He recalled 10,000 of the tickets which had been purchased by touts and advertised on other sites, and re-sold them through official channels at face value.

It was reported that one tout was selling a pair of tickets for a Sheeran gig at an eye watering sum of £174,000.

It was breath of fresh air to see an artist actually trying to do something about it.

Mike Sinner made his voice heard recently after tickets for The Streets comeback tour tickets were quickly in the clutches of touts shortly after release.

Skinner took to social media to get his views heard, and hit out at Ticketmaster for their lack of action.

He said: "Disgusted at the bot-driven tout sites that got hold of any tickets today.

"The team put in restrictions of two per transaction and have been cancelling suspicious orders using CC numbers and IP addresses and tried as hard as possible to minimise”.

“Ticketmaster’s Get Me In service is a disgrace."

Ticket touts have been about for decades but it isn't just your loud mouth on the street corner of events shouting "tickets for sale," who are the main danger.

With the internet now the most prominent tool for virtually anything, they are getting to even bigger markets to make their money.

However the authorities have stepped up their attempts to do something about it, and earlier this month raided the offices of Viagago and StubHub.

Investigators raided the offices of the resale companies as part of a probe into suspected breaches of consumer law in the “secondary ticketing” industry.

Officials from the Competition and Markets Authority seized information about the companies’ relationship with prominent ticket touts, who buy tickets for in-demand events and sell them via the two sites.

The raids are key to an investigation launched last year into whether ticketing companies are giving fans enough information about their tickets, such as who the seller is and whether buyers could be denied entry due to undisclosed restrictions on resale.

Investigators are also looking at whether touts benefit from “connections” at resale websites to gain advantage over genuine fans trying to get hold of tickets.

It shows it isn't just the artists themselves who are willing to do something to clamp down on these leeches that are sucking hard earned cash from the hands of fans.

In my rage on Sunday morning, it took my all of five minutes to come up with two ideas that could limit the touts or get rid of them all together.

A law could be potentially put in place, that states that websites such as Viagogo and StubHub can only sell on tickets are 20 per cent over the starting face value, therefore banning them for selling £40 tickets for up to £500.

Or another way of booting the touts into touch all together could be that tickets can only be used at the gate of a concert or event by the person who bought them, for example the card holder.

This is a system used by Glastonbury, whereby you have to submit a recent colour photograph when you purchase a ticket, and that ticket can only be used by you when you enter the festival site.

Labour MP Sharon Hodgson has called for touts to be banned outright, and her call came in the wake of news UK's biggest ticket touts, Julien Lavallee, set up a tax haven when he expanded into the UK.

Lavaelle has obtained hundreds of tickets for premium gigs in the past such as Adele, Drake and Ed Sheeran.

The bottom line is ticket touts are completely destroying fans ambitions to see their favourite acts, teams, concerts all to line their pockets in this way.

Currently the only law that exists is a street traders licence to sell tickets on the streets, but nothing is stopping them from selling online.

There are hundreds of more important things going on in the country at the moment. Brexit, housing prices, employment figures. But sorting out fat cat ticket touts from further increasing their bank balances should be something the government need to look at.