The war against ticket scalpers and scammers continues this week with the arrest of a man in South Australia for allegedly manufacturing and selling fake concert tickets to Justin Timberlake’s Australian tour.
Police were notified after people purchased concert tickets from online classifieds and, when they presented the ticket at the concert, were refused entry.
The tickets, in an email document, appear professional and authentic, however, they are copies of original tickets and are not valid for entry. The victims had arranged to meet at various locations and received the printed copies of the fake tickets in exchange for cash.
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A 30-year-old Woodville Park man was arrested on Monday 22 September and charged with several counts of deception. He was bailed to appear in the Port Adelaide Magistrates Court on 15 October.
A police spokesperson reminded the community “to be wary when purchasing concert tickets from anywhere other than licensed ticket agencies. The validity of tickets being purchased privately cannot be verified and may be restricted by ticket conditions.”
Police have urged anyone who has been a victim of this or other similar incidents to report it by calling 131 444.
A copy of one of the fraudulent tickets has also been released.
The arrest is just the latest in a string of ticket scalping cases over the past few years, both in Australia and overseas.
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In February last year a 22-year-old NSW man was jailed after scamming music fans into paying as much as $400 for non-existent tickets to festivals as well as ripping off sports fanatics looking for footy finals tickets
Overseas in London, a man used a fake ticketing website to scam over $6 million from imaginary tickets to high-profile concerts and major sporting events, and another 46-year-old woman from Stockport in Greater Manchester pleaded guilty to falsely advertised tickets on eBay for a sold-out George Michael tour to fund her gambling addiction.
Live Performance Australia is currently lobbying governments for uniform ticket scalping laws across Australia, where each state currently has its own approaches to dealing with third-party sellers and inflated prices on re-sold tickets. Such measures have already been proposed in New South Wales earlier this year.
But the anti-scalping changes were slammed by a number of ticketing companies, including re-seller platform viagogo and Ticketmaster, on the basis that government intervention can encroach on the rights of third-party sellers while further pushing unscrupulous scalpers into uncontrollable realms away from the monitor-able likes of online auction sites.
Research commissioned by viagogo alleges that 500,000 Australians were the victim of ticket scams and fraud in the last year, while the issue became a hot topic after backlash from fans who missed out on tickets to Bruce Springsteen’s Australian Tour 2014 saw Frontier Touring Boss Michael Gudinski damning “unscrupulous scalpers” and warning fans over being “duped” by online scammers.
Some are taking the matter into their own hands, with Ticketmaster and Melbourne’s Palais Theatre introducing their own online re-sale platforms, while music festivals Stereosonic and Splendour In The Grass have also warned against ticket touts while introducing their own anti-scalping measures.
