Ticket tout firms raided over fans’ rip-off claims
TWO giant online ticket touting firms have been raided by consumer watchdogs after thousands of complaints from music and sports fans.
Viagogo and StubHub, the two main ‘secondary ticket’ websites, are under investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority.
It has been claimed that both firms buy up thousands of tickets from touts, then resell them at inflated costs to make massive profits. The tickets are often for high-profile sports events and music concerts.
Viagogo, for example, has been criticised for selling £40 tickets to see pop star Ed Sheeran for as much as £5,000. Tickets to Wimbledon have been priced at up to £71,000 a pair.
A Victims of Viagogo group set up on Facebook has attracted hundreds of complaints from disgruntled customers claiming the website ‘tricked’ them into paying too much for tickets or didn’t deliver them at all.
The firms are being investigated over claims they have cosy relationships with touts. The CMA is also seeking to clarify whether the companies give customers sufficient detail about tickets.
The watchdog is also investigating the websites GetMeIn and Seatwave – but they are understood to have voluntarily supplied requested information about turnover and links with touts. Viagogo and StubHub refused to co-operate, prompting raids on their offices in London.
It has been claimed that customers should be told the identity of the vendor, and other details such as if the tickets are being resold. Some tickets are sold only to named people, and are not meant to be sold on. Customers have complained of being denied entry to venues in such cases.
The investigations are key to a CMA inquiry launched last year into ‘suspected breaches of consumer protection law in the online secondary tickets market’.
National Trading Standards, which tackles online scams, is also investigating touting to see whether buyers are being exploited.
The raids add to growing concern that Viagogo and StubHub are simply old-style greedy touts in new garb – and are making billions.
Viagogo was launched in London by American entrepreneur Eric Baker, who claimed it would beat the unsavoury touts and sell tickets at a fair price. Mr Baker lived in a
‘Overcharged by hundreds’
£7.2million flat in Knightsbridge while working in London. He simultaneously had a palatial flat in 15 Central Park West in New York.
In March Viagogo bosses were summoned to appear before the Culture, Media and Sport select committee in the House of Commons, as part of an investigation into ticket touting, but failed to turn up. MPs then accused the firm of ‘naked mis-selling and fraud’, lying to the public, and ‘contempt for Parliament’.
The firm paid just £26,000 in corporation tax in Britain in 2015, despite it being what Mr Baker boasts is a ‘multi-billion’ business.
Yet one of Viagogo’s key directors and investors, Canadian Danny Rimer – who lives in a £12million mansion in San Francisco – was rewarded with an OBE in 2017 for ‘services to business and charity’.
A spokesman for StubHub said it was awaiting the outcome of the CMA inquiry. Viagogo could not be contacted.