Confessions of a ticket scalper
Ticket reseller who was one of Viagogo’s top operators in the South Pacific now says Australian rules can protect gullible Kiwis, writes Rob Stock.
Aformer ticket scalper says the Government should protect ticket buyers by adopting Australia’s anti-scalping laws. They ban anyone from reselling tickets at events at major stadiums for more than 110% of the price they were originally sold at.
But the scalper, who spoke with the Sunday Star-Times on the understanding he would not be named, said there also needed to be a crackdown by tax authorities on scalpers, who should be paying tax on their ticket trading.
“As far as I can see right now, this is just a massive tax-free industry, and there’s so much money flying around the world, and there’s no accountability,” he said.
Scalping is the term used for buying events tickets in the hope of reselling them at a profit through online platforms such as Viagogo, Trade Me and Ticketmaster Resale.
Scalping is back in the news thanks to a case taken by the Commerce Commission against ticket resale website Viagogo, which the commission said in court is predominantly a platform for professional scalpers, who are responsible for 90% of sales on the site.
But scalping is an emotive term, which the “reformed scalper” did not like.
“It’s just a word that will trigger people very quickly,” he said.
The scalper, who provided evidence of his scalping success, claimed to have made over $300,000 scalping, relying on the gullibility of Kiwi buyers.
He started while at university, “dabbling around with it, to see if it works”.
“I paid off my student loan by the time I had left [university]. That’s what motivated me at that stage,” he said.
He pooled money with a friend and family member, and continued after he left university, and headed overseas to start his career.
‘‘Money just becomes almost a little bit of a drug, I’d say. You get addicted to this huge amount of extra money coming in each week, and you keep on pumping more and more time into it,’’ he said.
He said it took him a while to get good at it.
‘‘Viagogo said I was one of the biggest ones in the South Pacific.’’
It was not all plain sailing, though.
‘‘The stress of selling was also high, with constant harassment from organisations such as NZ Rugby. The number of abusive calls I received from their group of old boys was quite comical,’’ he said.
Those who left him with the least doubt about how they felt were Waikato Chiefs fans.
The abuse didn’t come through Viagogo, he said, but Trade Me.
‘‘When I was selling on Trade Me, I would get the craziest things sent to me. Waikato Chiefs fans were the worst.They would sent stuff to you like, ‘I hope your dad gets cancer’, just like the most vile things I have seen in my life.’’
Juggling scalping and fulltime work was exhausting, he said.
‘‘It’s very stressful, like when you’ve got a job, and you’re busy 12 to 14 hours a day, and you have to go home and upload 50 tickets for some crappy concert.’’
Sometimes one of the multiple credit cards he was juggling to keep his purchases as anonymous as possible would not process a transaction.
‘‘You’re sitting there at 2am downloading tickets, trying to get your credit card to work. It’s a lot of work you end up putting into it,’’ he said.
‘‘It’s not just buy a ticket and sell it for tonnes of money. You have to do a little bit of work.’’
But scalpers add no value. They buy up tickets and try to resell them for a profit, either by buying tickets and hoping events sell out, or by exploiting incautious people buying tickets thinking they are dealing with an official ticketseller.
In the High Court at Auckland, the Commerce Commission is trying to prove Viagogo misled buyers into thinking it was an ‘‘official’’ ticket sale site, as well as misleading them about how scarce tickets for events were.
Viagogo denies the claims. It has also made changes to the way it markets itself, including promising to never again take out Google Ads containing the word ‘‘official’’.
The former scalper was amazed at how incautious some New Zealand buyers were, clicking on Google adverts because they came up first on a search page, and paying over the official price to scalpers for tickets at events that had not yet sold out.
‘‘While Viagogo is not the root of the issue in New Zealand, the real problem lies in the gullibility of the consumer,’’ he said.
‘‘Anyone with a basic level of intelligence should be able to identify that Viagogo is not the official seller of tickets, as it is clearly stated on their website.
‘‘I agree it’s [scalping] slightly unethical, but I also argue it’s just the nature of supply and demand,’’ he said.
‘‘Selling on Viagogo when an event sold out is morally questionable, but it’s not illegal.
‘‘What’s the difference between buying some crappy car, putting a spoiler on it, and selling it for more?
‘‘It’s not worse than houseflipping, which you could argue has very, very negative impacts on the New Zealand economy, and general population health.’’
Now his day job was progressing well, and he was no longer going hard in the business.
Despite that, he was not keen to be linked to his past moneymaking sideline because he knew he would be judged badly for it.
Things had been changing in the resale market, he said. Events were no longer selling out routinely.
Whereas years ago, he could make $200, $300, or even $400 per ticket, the gain would now be just $10 to $50.
He also thought New Zealanders did not realise many of the scalpers at work were based overseas, and were very professional, even using bots to manage their accounts, which had been making it harder for parttimers.
‘‘You might not make a lot of money, because there are so many people doing it now,’’ he said, but ‘‘you would probably still make the minimum wage in New Zealand, if not more.’’
There’s another thing that would deter scalpers, he said. ‘‘Require scalpers to share their real names, particularly on platforms like Trade Me, which would serve as a deterrent.’’
‘‘It’s not worse than house-flipping, which you could argue has very, very negative impacts on the New Zealand economy.’’