These touts made millions - and claimed staff at big ticketing firms helped

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"Revisiting outdated claims about long-defunct businesses only serves to confuse and mislead the public," the company said.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."

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.

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.

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.

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".