‘Unhappy fans can take action against ticket scalpers’

PETALING JAYA: A disgruntled buyer can seek legal action against the ticket scalpers but not the ticketing agent because there is no direct contract between both parties, said Kuala Lumpur Bar committee member Alex Netto.

“This is because of the whole contractual relationship. You have no course of action against the ticketing agent because you did not buy it directly with them, but action can be taken against the (third party) person who sold you the ticket,” he said.

Netto added that authorised ticket sellers would also not be able to take any legal action against ticket resellers as the purchase of tickets was between the sellers and the buyers.

“It’s a willing buyer, willing seller arrangement. If there is to be any course of action, it must be between the reseller and the recipient.

“In scalping, there is no criminal offence per se. Even if you are to lodge a police report because you were cheated, the police will rule this as not a criminal offence because it does not fall within the ambit of the Penal Code.

“They will write it off as RTM (refer to the magistrate), then it is up to the magistrate to decide if this is an offence of a criminal nature or not, followed by instructions to the police accordingly,” he said.

Meanwhile, the event ticketing industry, search engines and even superstar Ed Sheeran are fighting back at the scalpers.

In July last year, British media reported that the singer-songwriter Sheeran had launched a war on ticket touts in Britain by cancelling 50,000 resold tickets from his Divide World Tour.

Event promoters, artistes and the ticketing industry are working together to stop scalping, said Dirk Sass, chief executive officer of ticketing solutions company SeatAdvisor.

Sass said limiting the number of tickets each customer can buy is one of the ways.

SeatAdvisor’s advanced ticketing software has tracking systems that allow them to track how and where the online ticket travels after it is issued to the customer.

To avoid bulk purchases, SeatAdvisor can limit credit cards, IP addresses and registered email addresses to just one or two transactions while encryption tools can stop ticket scalper bots.

However, these security measures are not an industry-wide standard in Malaysia.

Two other ticketing platforms that The Star interviewed prohibit the resale of tickets in their policy but say they do not have active measures to prevent scalping.

“We can’t stop people from buying in bulk (if organisers do not set a quota),” said Ticketcharge general manager Kinnix Chan.

Sass, who is also the CEO of MyTicket Asia, called on the Government to criminalise scalping and block these websites.

Online marketplace Carousell became known as the place to find scalpers after tickets for the 2017 sold-out Coldplay concert in Singapore were resold there at a 3,000% increase.

After receiving international pressure to remove reselling websites, Google released new restrictions this month that require resellers to first be certified with Google by clearly disclosing to customers that their ticket prices are higher than originally priced.

Ticketing platforms stressed that ultimately, the onus is on the consumers not to fuel the demand for resold tickets.