TOUGHER LAWS ARE ON THE WAY

A LEGAL clampdown is on its way but Newman – and anyone he recruits to buy and sell tickets – could potentially already be in breach of the law.

The Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 prevent anyone from a company buying tickets while passing themselves off as fans.

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 makes it compulsory for sellers to say who they are and declare seat numbers – which would make it easy for artists and promoters to cancel tickets harvested in bulk by touts.

Each breach of this could be met with a £5000 fine.

Resale site Stubhub did attempt to give seller information but scrapped that move towards transparency after the Record exposed some of their powersellers.

They included Newman and Canadian Julien Lavallee – who have become major targets for the campaign to curb ticket touts.

The Computer Misuse Act 1990 already prohibits bots from being used to jump ahead of regular fans in the ticket queue.

The Digital Economy Bill, currently going through Parliament, has been amended to specifically ban bots, with unlimited fines in the pipeline for anyone caught using the computer trickery to harvest tickets.

The Lords passed a further amendment to that legislation this week that makes it mandatory to list the ticket numbers on resale sites.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) are currently investigating potential breaches of the Consumer Right Act 2015.

HMRC are also currently investigating sales ledgers from big shows to see if touts have failed to pay taxes – which could lead to prison sentences for anyone caught out.