Secondary Ticketing Once Again Damages The Reputation of Online Ticketing

Skiddle is a primary ticket outlet, that means we sell tickets from an allocation provided to us by the event’s promoter or venue, we work hard to make sure tickets aren’t being bought for resale and we don’t associate ourselves with the types of organisations that resell tickets.

Buying a ticket for excessive multiples does nothing more than encourage people to make a quick buck by buying a ticket early and selling it later on. Worse still it leads to organisations and individuals becoming organised in how they go about buying and reselling tickets, ripping off the event going public and distorting the forces of supply and demand that are essential for event promoters to understand how their events are performing and being received pre-event.

Secondary Ticket Outlets and The Case of 2,000 Fake Tickets

Recently, a case of massive ticket fraud has been discovered with thousands of fake tickets being sold through secondary ticket outlets. Around 2,000 e-tickets have turned up already in a fraud in which the perpetrator has generated around £1 million.

The venues that have been affected have been the big ticket venues including the likes of  The O2 in London and The LG Arena in Birmingham, they’ve seen gigs by some of the biggest name acts being targeted with people being turned away at the door for concerts by Beyonce, Crazy Horses, Neil Young, Depeche Mode and Bruno Mars.

Live UK reported that all tickets had been bought from secondary ticket outlets such as Viagogoo, Seatwave, Get Me In! and Stub Hub (owned by Ticketmaster and eBay respectively).

The suspicion is that the tickets in questions have come from one source. According to Live UK the ticket tout and fraudster in question was able to overcome the security processes put in place by all of the above websites simply by having multiple accounts and because they’d otherwise behaved in a legitimate manner for a number of months prior.

Damaging To Online Ticket Sales

This is just an example of someone that got caught, largely through greed, however it does shine some more light into the often murky waters of the secondary ticket market and ultimately this impacts on all of the ticketing sector and especially impacts how people perceive the online ticketing outlets.

Fortunately there has been a number of arrests regarding this one incident, however news of the arrests came shortly after the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Music said it would urge select committees to re-examine secondary ticketing legislation. The verdict could land some secondary ticket agencies and websites in serious hot water, it could have negative further down the chain of the live events industry as it’s been widely reported that they’re being used by some event promoters and artistes to increase their own revenue streams.

Skiddle.com: Preventing Ticket Fraud and Ticket Reselling

Over the years Skiddle has aggressively employed a policy of zero tolerance when it comes to reselling tickets, we have strict rules covering the event promoters that add events to Skiddle, which include remittance scheduling to only reward events that have taken place as well as monitoring and dealing with fraudulent and irregular ticket buying behaviours and dealing with reselling of tickets previously sold on Skiddle.

To list events and tickets on Skiddle and to benefit from our experiences, garnered in this sector since 2001, whilst utilising what is probably the most sophisticated ticketing solution, event promoters need simply visit our Promotion Centre.