Touts employ overseas workers to bulk-buy gig tickets

More than 900,000 tickets were sold for Oasis's long-awaited reunion tour, which starts in Cardiff next Friday.

But thousands of frustrated fans failed to get tickets for the sell-out gigs after spending hours in online queues.

Shortly after pre-sale, where a limited number of fans could buy Oasis tickets when they went on sale in August, tickets for their UK gigs were being listed on resale websites like StubHub and Viagogo for more than £6,000 - about 40 times the face value of a standing ticket.

We found genuine fans missed out or, in desperation, ended up paying way over the odds as touts have an army of people working for them to buy tickets for the most in-demand events as soon as they go on sale.

Ali, the boss of the ticket pulling company, boasted to our undercover reporter that he'd been successful at securing tickets for popular gigs.

"I think we had 300 Coldplay tickets and then we had Oasis in the same week - we did great," he told us.

Ali claimed he knew of a UK tout who made more than £500,000 last year doing this and reckons others are "making millions".

Touts often list their tickets on resale websites and one former Viagogo employee alleged he had seen some profiles with thousands of tickets for sale.

"They [touts] buy in bulk most of the time in the hope of reselling and making a profit," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"I don't know how they get their hands on them but I know that at some point they would have bought tickets in bulk in serious numbers.

"You're not allowing a lot of people to get access because you're hoarding the tickets."

But we found 8,000 tickets being advertised illegally online for more than face value for Arsenal's Premier League game with Chelsea at the Emirates Stadium on 16 March.

One of those sellers was a semi-professional footballer based in the UK.

Bogdan Stolboushkin has openly advertised tickets for football games totalling more than £60,000 on social media in the past year alone.

He sold our reporter a single ticket at double the face value.

Mr Stolboushkin did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him about these allegations.

Another potentially illegal practice in the UK is "speculative selling", where touts list tickets for resale without owning them.

There is no guarantee these touts will actually secure a ticket and "speculative selling" was one of the reasons two touts were jailed for fraud in 2020.

Our investigation found at least 104 seats being "speculatively" listed on Viagogo for Catfish and the Bottlemen's August concert at Cardiff's Principality Stadium.

The exact seats appeared to be for sale at the same time on both Ticketmaster, the original point of sale, and Viagogo.

But Dame Caroline Dinenage, chairwoman of the UK government's cross-party Culture, Media and Sport committee said: "It's a minefield for people who just want to buy tickets for an event they want to enjoy.

"This evidence proves that there is not enough activity going on either from the government, in some cases from the police and certainly from some of these really big online organisations to be able to clamp down on this sort of activity."

The Conservative MP said this investigation highlighted "what a lot of consumers are already seeing that there is a whole world of, in some cases illegal, but in all cases immoral activity going on in the ticketing sphere".

"People are having to pay over the odds because others quite often are operating outside of the UK to make an absolute killing on buying up tickets, selling them at a huge premium and in some cases selling tickets that don't exist at all," she added.

The UK government's aim is to "strengthen consumer protections and stop fans getting ripped off", according to the UK culture secretary.

Lisa Nandy added she wanted to "ensure money spent on tickets goes back into our incredible live events sector, instead of into the pockets of greedy touts".

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