When a judge dismissed an appeal by prolific ticket tout Peter Hunter and his husband and accomplice David Smith against their landmark conviction for fraud, he sounded an alarm.
The evidence, he said in a 2021 judgement, suggested the possibility of “connivance and collusion” between ticketing companies and touts, who buy up tickets for live events in bulk and sell them to the public at inflated prices.
A different judge sentencing another group of ticket touts for fraud, including the self-styled “Ticket Queen” Maria Chenery-Woods, last year raised similar concerns and suggested the possibility some ticketing sites had been “complicit” in the touts making “substantial profits” by reselling tickets.
Hunter fraudulently traded tickets between 2010 and 2017, Chenery-Woods between 2012 and 2017. They both used all of the four big UK ticket resale sites: StubHub, Viagogo and the Ticketmaster-owned GetMeIn! and Seatwave.
For years, fans had battled touts to get the tickets they wanted and to avoid heavy mark-ups on resale sites. Meanwhile, Ticketmaster had publicly insisted that it was trying to combat ticket touting, which can be illegal in some circumstances.
The company – one of the UK’s biggest ticket sellers – was in a unique position until 2018, as a ticketing website which also owned two major resale platforms.
Although Ticketmaster was not involved or represented in either of these court cases, the judges’ comments about the industry suggested that the full story may not yet have been told. We wanted to investigate what was going on before the company shut its resale sites in 2018.
We spoke to former and current ticketing staff, who enjoyed working for Ticketmaster but in some cases were concerned that fans might have been short-changed. We also spoke to promoters, venue managers and consultants, and combed through court transcripts.
What we heard was that ticket touts had inside help with their business buying and selling tickets from the ticketing platforms they used:
Ticketmaster said in a statement that the allegations refer to “companies that were dissolved in 2018 and alleged events from over a decade ago, which have no relevance to today’s ticketing landscape”.
“Revisiting outdated claims about long-defunct businesses only serves to confuse and mislead the public,” the company said.
It added that Ticketmaster has “no involvement in the uncapped resale market” now and said: “We have always been committed to fair and secure ticketing.”
Hunter and Chenery-Woods were not the kind of touts who stand outside a venue discreetly asking passers-by to buy or sell tickets. These two turned their spare rooms into registered, tax-paying companies and made millions from trading tickets online, the courts found.
Mike Andrews, who leads National Trading Standards’ e-crimes unit and was involved in the investigation into Hunter and the Ticket Queen, told the BBC how he joined the early morning raid on the anonymous townhouse in a tree-lined north London street where Hunter ran his operation.
Upstairs was a room filled with PCs, whirring away, buying and selling tickets. “It was obviously an operation that ran pretty much 24/7,” Mr Andrews said. They also found rolls of tickets in seat-number order for events such as Lady Gaga concerts and the Harry Potter play, and multiple credit cards.
Reselling tickets for profit for live performances in the UK is not illegal. But Hunter and Chenery-Woods were convicted of using fraudulent practices to get around restrictions – such as limits on the number of tickets an individual can buy.
They pretended to be lots of different people, using lots of different credit cards, when they bought the tickets from companies such as Ticketmaster, See Tickets or AXS – which are known as primary ticketing websites.
The Ticket Queen used the details of family members, including a dead relative, to buy tickets, as well as using the names and addresses of dozens of people in and around the town of Diss, Norfolk where her business operated.
To sell the tickets, the touts used resale sites, which are known as the secondary ticketing websites.
Touts were “working hand-in-hand with resale platforms”, Mr Andrews told us.
A former staffer at Ticketmaster-owned Seatwave, who asked to remain anonymous, told us touts were “VIPs” on the resale site. “They were doing a lot of business for us. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions.”
Some staff at Seatwave had a cosy relationship with touts, according to the former employee, who said he would take Paul Douglas – the Ticket Queen’s former brother-in-law, also convicted of fraud – out for a pint when he visited London.
Resale sites make their money from fees paid by buyers and commission from the sellers – court papers show these could be as much as 25% of the resale price. Prosecutors calculated that Hunter’s company received sales revenue of £26.4m over about seven-and-a-half years. Based on their typical commission, the UK’s four main resale sites could have received £8.8m between them from Hunter’s sales alone.
Touts who consistently delivered large volumes of tickets to customers were offered discounts by resale platforms, industry sources told us. During the case where he was convicted of fraud, Peter Hunter alleged that GetMeIn! – another Ticketmaster-owned company – offered him “incentives” for selling in bulk, such as £4,000 cashback if he hit sales of £550,000 over a three-month period.
Multiple sources told us that some touts also sourced tickets directly through relationships with promoters and venues, but sales at Hunter’s level were far beyond what any regular customer could acquire legitimately from primary ticketing websites.
Even though the primary ticketing companies were victims of the fraud – as their purchase limits were breached by the use of false identities – Mr Andrews said none of the primary ticketing companies “directly supported” the prosecutions.
Another former employee who worked in Ticketmaster’s resale technical team, who also wanted to remain anonymous, told the BBC his team would work closely with touts, developing software that helped them sell tickets in the secondary market.
“You have to build a relationship with them, they’re like a customer basically,” he said. The team would show touts products and ask for feedback, including if they made selling tickets easier for them and often showing them multiple versions, he said.
We have been told that resale sites would liaise with big sellers, like Hunter.
In court, Hunter alleged a senior boss at GetMeIn! would help him by passing on information from Ticketmaster’s legal department such as “government reports maybe from select committees” and ringing him weekly to tip him off about forthcoming sales before the public learned about them.
This senior employee had described in emails how he added a “new privilege” to the accounts of “top brokers” – the resale sites’ term for touts – which would allow them to automatically “drip feed” large inventories of tickets on to the site.
Other emails were read in court as evidence from Peter Hunter’s defence team, suggesting that the senior GetMeIn! boss offered to help stop Hunter’s tickets being cancelled by Ticketmaster when he had fallen foul of a purchase limit.
The court heard that the senior employee had written: “I think Ticketmaster are looking at cancelling primary bookings that have exceeded the ticket limit. However, if I flag them as GMI [GetMeIn!], I should be able to save them.”
Hunter’s defence alleged the correspondence showed the GetMeIn! boss knew the tout had multiple Ticketmaster accounts which he used to buy more tickets than the site’s restrictions allowed.
Using multiple names and identities to buy more tickets than the limit allowed was one of the reasons Hunter was jailed for fraud.
In the trial of the Ticket Queen, the prosecution said this same GetMeIn! boss and a colleague had both been “complicit or at least indifferent” in her use of a false name on the resale site to conceal the fact that the account belonged to a tout.
The court heard that Maria Chenery-Woods had emailed the two men asking to change her account name from “Ticket Queen” to “Elsie Marshall” in February 2017.
In both court cases, the prosecution questioned why it was necessary for the accused to pretend to be other people to buy tickets if, as the defendants alleged, Ticketmaster knew what they were doing.
The links with touts such as Hunter went right to the highest levels of Ticketmaster’s group of companies, according to emails read out in court as evidence. They record the same senior GetMeIn! boss proposing a meeting between Hunter and Selina Emeny, the company’s top legal representative and a director of Live Nation Ltd, an arm of Ticketmaster’s parent company.
The proposed meeting in 2015 was intended to “address any worries” Hunter might have about a change in the law around ticket resale and “brainstorm what more can be done by our legal team to help UK brokers”.
Ms Emeny is currently listed as an active director of 50 companies on Companies House, all related to Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster maintained that its resale platforms, GetMeIn! and Seatwave, operated as “separate entities”, in the words of then chairman Chris Edmonds at a 2016 House of Commons select committee hearing.
But both Mr Edmonds and Ms Emeny were directors of Ticketmaster UK Ltd and the holding company which owned Seatwave. Ms Emeny was also a director and secretary of GetMeIn! and at one time, all three companies operated out of the same open-plan office in central London.
David Brown, who worked in Ticketmaster’s technology teams between 2011 and 2017, also told the BBC the companies had close enough links that they could have found out who was buying tickets in bulk and putting them up for resale on Ticketmaster’s other platforms.
He said Ticketmaster and its resale sites used “a lot of the same infrastructure” and it would have been easy to “link everything together”. “You’re not building completely separate databases,” he said.
He said it meant Ticketmaster could have connected the accounts and credit cards originally purchasing tickets with those selling in bulk on resale sales, and stop them reselling.
“We should be able to pull enough data to say there’s something not right about this, this isn’t just members of the public selling tickets. If they wanted to really tackle the problem, they had all the tools in one place to do that,” he said.
Christoph Homann, who was the then resale managing director of Ticketmaster/GetMeIn!, said in 2014 to a group of MPs that “they are able to cross-reference” some tickets on GetMeIn! “against Ticketmaster’s records” to report suspected frauds.
The employee in Ticketmaster’s resale technology team who developed software to help touts also told the BBC that there was a senior executive who had “oversight” over elements of the primary selling and resale side of the operation. That person could easily have accessed an internal list of top-selling brokers, the employee said.
He said the executive “would definitely ask that question, ask for that information. I can’t believe that wouldn’t be seen by him”.
Mr Edmonds, Ticketmaster’s chairman in 2016, had told Parliament that the company did not have “visibility” over how the sellers on its resale platforms acquired those tickets – but these accounts suggest Ticketmaster could have found out if they were buying them on their own website.
We also asked the other two large resale ticketing platforms, Viagogo and Stubhub about their relationships with large sellers, including account managers and inventory management software.
Viagogo told us such facilities are “standard industry practice”, but it “takes its responsibilities under the law very seriously”. It said it had a business relationship with Hunter, Smith and two of the Ticket Queen’s accomplices “before they were found to be guilty of any fraudulent activity”.
“Bad actors go against what we stand for and Viagogo is in full support of the legal action taken against them,” the company said.
StubHub International told the BBC, it is “fully compliant with UK regulations and provides industry-leading consumer protections.” It added: “As a marketplace we provide a safe, trusted and transparent platform for the buying and selling of tickets, and enforce strict measures to protect consumers against fraud.”
Some employees of companies then owned by Ticketmaster were occasionally paid by touts to buy tickets on their behalf, the prosecution told the court in the Ticket Queen trial.
The prosecution added the Ticket Queen’s accomplices paid two GetMeIn! employees out of a separate bank account from the usual company one. According to a Skype message read in court, one accomplice said: “It will be best as it won’t show a GMI employee being paid by TQ Tickets.”
One of her buyers was an employee at GetMeIn! who received £8,500 in less than a year from this sideline, the prosecution said.
Our research found this employee’s day job was to source replacement tickets when sellers failed to deliver, as they sometimes did.
The resale platforms would sometimes buy tickets from touts to fulfil orders in these circumstances, a SeatWave employee told the BBC. The touts would behave “like the mafia”, and raise their prices when they knew the resale platform itself was in the market for tickets, the employee said.
Evidence presented in court suggested help for the touts to buy tickets in bulk also came from another well-known company: American Express, which offers its cardholders privileged access to tickets for events through pre-sales. Promoters say sponsors like American Express are important in making events such as Formula One and British Summer Time Hyde Park possible.
Peter Hunter told the court he had received a LinkedIn message out of the blue from a representative at the credit card company. The rep was offering “as many additional cards as you wanted” in the form of Platinum business credit cards with an “unlimited spend”, according to Hunter.
The Amex representative wrote that he was aware of Ticketmaster’s purchasing limit of six tickets per day on each credit card and told Hunter “there are ways around this with American Express”.
The rep also suggested in an email to Peter Hunter that his vice-president at the company was “happy to waive card fees” and that the VP’s “initial offer was to waive 15 card fees for £250k spend in the first two months”.
American Express told the BBC: “When we identify instances of misconduct, we investigate the issues raised and take appropriate steps to address them, including disciplinary action with employees as necessary.”
Ticketmaster announced the closure of its resale sites, GetMeIn! and Seatwave in 2018, months after Peter Hunter was charged. Now it allows resales through its main site instead and says prices are capped at the ticket’s face value.
Instead, Ticketmaster is now trying to “capture the value” of the resale market through different tiers of pricing for tickets labelled as “in demand” or “Platinum” tickets, as UK managing director Andrew Parsons told the House of Commons earlier this year.
“We think it is absolutely right that artists should be able to price a small amount of the tickets at a higher price to be able to keep overall prices down and capture some of that value away from the secondary market,” he said.
But ticket touts are still very much active. Minutes after Beyonce’s first pre-sale started in February for the UK leg of her Cowboy Carter tour, hundreds of the tickets appeared on resale sites such as Stubhub.
Stubhub told us that “speculative listings” are not allowed on its platform and that it “[does] not support the use of bots which operate during sales on the primary market”.
“Although the primary platforms do say that they have measures in place to try and prevent touts buying large numbers of tickets, it’s quite evident that that practice took place then and still takes place now,” said Mr Andrews from National Trading Standards.
But he said “the current situation is that we’re not funded or we haven’t got sufficient resources to continue to pursue further touts”.
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