THE MARRIED ‘OLD GITS’ WHO FLEECED FANS
A PPEARANCES can deceive, but you’d be hard pressed to believe bespectacled Peter Hunter and David Smith were the kingpins of a multi-millionpound criminal empire. Hunter, 51, and his civil partner Smith, 66, were not drug smugglers or gangland bosses. Their crime? Selling concert tickets run from a bedroom in their terraced home. In a landmark prosecution, the ticket touts were convicted yesterday of fraudulently fleecing genuine music fans by reselling tickets online. They made £6million from resold tickets for everything from Liam Gallagher concerts to the Chelsea Flower Show.
Trading as Ticket Wizz and later BZZ, the pair would gobble up tickets from primary online sellers and then flog them at heavy mark-ups on the so-called big four secondary ticketing websites – Viagogo, Stub Hub, Get Me In and Seatwave.
To get around the limits on how many tickets they could buy, they fraudulently used a variety of credit cards, addresses and computer software to ‘ harvest’ the tickets ‘en masse’.
Many fans who have bought tickets online from the big four have horror stories of paying hundreds or even thousands of pounds over the odds.
Smith and Hunter’s lawyers tried to claim that buying tickets at market value and selling them at eye-watering prices may be ‘parasitic’ but it’s not illegal.
Indeed, nine ticket sites – including See Tickets, Ticketmaster and AXS – declined to participate in the trial after being called to give evidence as ‘victims’.
But the pair’s convictions raise an important question: With ticket touting said to be worth £700million a year in the UK alone, will those behind huge resale sites such as Viagogo soon be in the dock themselves?
Hunter trained as a chef in one of Dublin’s top restaurants before moving to London to work at Princess Diana’s favourite restaurant, Le Caprice in Mayfair.
At 28, he became head chef of a restaurant in the City. By this time, he had met Smith, a former literary editor from County Durham who would become his romantic and business partner.
While Hunter was working as a chef, a waitress who didn’t have a credit card wanted four tickets for a Madonna concert and asked Hunter for help. The enterprising Irishman bought four for her, plus six more he placed on eBay. ‘I thought I would make a bit of money,’ he said. In fact, he made a killing – £100 from each £50 ticket – and was hooked.
He told jurors at Leeds Crown Court that by 2004 he decided to quit catering, adding: ‘I realised I could earn more money selling tickets than working as a chef.’
The same year, he and Smith – who were described by neighbours as ‘grumpy old gits’ – set up Ticket Wizz, buying tickets at face value and selling them at inflated prices on eBay from their £600,000 home in Tottenham, north London. Neighbours said everyone on the street knew they sold tickets from a home full of computers.
Soon, they were driving a Porsche, and in a two-and-a-half-year period raked in an average trading profit of, £52,000 a week.
DUE in part to Press coverage of ripoff secondary ticketing sellers – mostly Viagogo – the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced in December 2016 that it was investigating the industry.
That month Hunter changed the name of Ticket Wizz to BZZ – and continued trading. But by 2018 it was clear that their empire – and the enjoyment of the high life if afforded them – was about to end.
When singer Ed Sheeran announced a stadium tour, his management said tickets would be restricted to four per person and any resold tickets would be invalid. Seatwave, Get Me In and Stub Hub agreed not to list the tickets, but Viagogo refused.
Hunter and Smith took advantage, purchasing more than 1,000 £75 tickets using fake identities and selling them at around £280 each on Viagogo. Initially, fans who bought them were not admitted to gigs, but many were allowed to repurchase the voided tickets at face value.
SHEERAN’S manager, Stuart Camp, told the trial the singer would ‘rather play a million more shows than charge more for tickets’. Having test-purchased BZZ tickets for the West End show Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, the CMA fined the firm 150 per cent of their resale price.
However, Hunter said that rather than defrauding the likes of Ticketmaster, such firms knew precisely what was going on.
His barrister, describing how Ticketmaster and eight other ticketing firms refused to co-operate with the trial, said: ‘It stands to reason that an individual on trial for fraud is not going to be able to secure the attendance of any witness who would be forced to reveal practices the prosecution say amounts to fraud for fear that they might be prosecuted.’
Colin Rumford, of the National Trading Standards eCrime team, which investigates online fraud, said: ‘This case is a real warning. This was a serious level of criminality.’
Defending himself, Hunter said: ‘This case is about f*****g greed. I’m not a f*****g greedy person.’ The jury disagreed.