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Online resales are difficult to police and few practical remedies are available.
Consumer law expert Joe Edwards, a partner at Russell McVeagh, says if the Commerce Commission wins its case against Viagogo in the High Court, it’s difficult to see how any ruling will be enforced. The commission is not taking a prosecution, but is seeking declarations that the Swiss-based company has breached the Fair Trading Act, and an injunction restraining it from further breaches.
In 2011, Edwards was seconded to the International Rugby Board, and part of his role was to try to prevent World Cup ticket scams generated by Norwegian websites. He says overseas sites always present jurisdictional challenges. “The Commerce Commission and Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment did everything they could to prevent it from a practical perspective, but it’s very difficult to stop an overseas-based company from selling things online that arguably breach New Zealand law.”
Asked if Google has any responsibility to stop its algorithms leading consumers to questionable sites, Edwards says its response would be that it could only do so much. “It’s very difficult for the likes of Google to be a sort of online police and determine if a site is legitimate or not based on some consumer complaints, when other customers are receiving the exact product they want, which is resold tickets.”
If websites were advertising tickets as “resales” when they knew they were not, it raised issues under the Fair Trading Act, as the customer was likely to be deceived and pay a premium because the tickets were in demand. “That’s why you’d go to a resale website when you could have bought them off the original site.”
A consumer could take a ticket seller to court, but realistically that wouldn’t happen, so the best option was a complaint to the Commerce Commission. A complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority might lead to a finding in the consumer’s favour, but it offered no redress. A complaint to the Disputes Tribunal incurs a $50 fee.
He believes legislation stopping people reselling tickets would be difficult to police because of the raft of social media avenues available to individuals to dispose of them.
He says the UK Advertising Standards Authority has instructed ticket resale sites, including Viagogo, to be more transparent with fees and charges.