Don’t make ticket tout ban a one-off

TICKETMASTER gained great plaudits for vowing “zero tolerance” of ticket touts after vultures descended on the One Love Manchester gig.

Scumbags seeking to profit from the deaths of 22 innocent children and adults in a terrorist atrocity that afflicted that proud city are among the lowest of the low.

Ticketmaster stopped touts reselling briefs on their websites in a quick, decisive move.

So why can’t they act in the same admirable manner when it comes to ticket touts the Record has regularly exposed over the past year? Why are they not on a Ticketmaster blacklist?

Ticketmaster have refused the Record’s repeated demands to do so – perhaps because their trade makes so much money for Ticketmaster and their parent company Live Nation.

The list of touts is long and growing. We lifted the lid on the likes of Andrew Newman, from Linlithgow, whose business used multiple identities to get his paws on thousands of tickets.

Experts say the black market industry is ripping real fans off by £400million a year.

This paper’s campaign on touting has already gone right to heart of it at Westminster. MPs took a real interest in the scandals we helped expose.

We must be doing something right because the campaign is even backed by the most notorious ticket tout in history.

Ken Lowson says it would take minutes to adapt Ticketmaster’s system to immediately flag up and ban super touts.

He even offered to do the job free. But the firm have now proven they can easily put a block on touts by doing so this time.

A cynic might suggest they had no option but to block touts for this event. Not to do so would have been a PR disaster for them.

But now Ticketmaster have shown they can do it once, we have a message for them: It’s time to make the tout ban permanent and end the exploitation of fans.