TICKET SHARKS
£124 seats to watch the stars of Strictly cost me £325!
Money Mail Chief Reporter THE Daily Mail has been deluged with complaints from readers telling how they were ripped off by Viagogo and criticising Google for taking cash from the site.
Jan Bird faced losing hundreds of pounds after buying tickets to see Strictly Come Dancing stars Anton Du Beke and Erin Boag through Viagogo. She said it was the topranked firm on Google which made her believe she could trust it.
Mrs Bird, 56, a former property developer, said she understood the tickets were priced at £124 for two so she went ahead with the purchase for herself and husband John, 58.
But when she received an email receipt from the firm she discovered she had in fact handed over £325 for the tickets. Mrs Bird, from Steeple Ashton in Wiltshire, said she at no point remembers seeing this figure when she was buying her seats.
When the tickets arrived they had a face value of £31 and were in a Russian-sounding woman’s name. Fearing she would be humiliatingly barred from using the tickets if she presented them at the theatre because they were in the wrong name, Mrs Bird tried to get a refund from Viagogo.
However the firm refused and in the end she got a refund through her credit card company. She said: ‘I am pretty computer savvy and careful about using websites. I feel silly about being duped but Viagogo are really very clever.’
Ronnie Kerr fears he has been ripped off after inadvertently spending almost £200 on two tickets through Viagogo to see the musical Miss Saigon in Edinburgh.
‘I had never head of Viagogo before but because they were top of the Google rankings I thought they would be trustworthy,’ said Mr Kerr, 66. The retired insurance manager from Stirling said the tickets were initially advertised at £60 each. But at the end of the purchase process the price had suddenly jumped to £184.
He tried to cancel the purchase but the transaction went through on his bank card. He then tried to cancel his tickets with the firm but said he was told he could only get a response within 72 hours of the event date and in receipt of tickets.
The tickets arrived via email with a face value of £42 each – the cheapest at the event.
Mr Kerr said: ‘Google will have received an absolute fortune from Viagogo for it to appear high up on the rankings. It needs to end its connection with the firm. If Viagogo’s behaviour is not illegal, it is certainly immoral.’
Retired solicitor John Burwood, 83, paid £267 for two tickets to see singer Michael Bolton at the Sunderland Empire in December through Viagogo which he came across through Google. But the tickets he received were in someone else’s name and had a face value of £41 each.
He feared he would not be allowed into the concert as he could not prove the tickets were his and said he repeatedly contacted the company but got no response.
The concert was eventually cancelled but Mr Burwood, from Morpeth, Northumberland, said: ‘Getting my money back has been like beating my head against a brick wall.’