Ticket resale caps won't stop fans from getting scammed

Sounds fair enough – but, now, in your desperation to see your favourite artist, you’re running an enormous risk that you didn’t face before.

You find tickets online for a sold-out gig. The seller looks genuine. Their profile seems real. The price feels about right. So you send the money.

And the ticket never arrives.

The Government’s plans for a price cap will push ticket reselling into the shadows.

Earlier this week ministers published their much-anticipated Fraud Strategy, announcing a £250m investment to disrupt fraudsters and better protect the public. Taken at face value, this is a worthy attempt to protect consumers. However, the government’s price-cap plans throw all this into jeopardy as capping resale prices will not eliminate demand for resale tickets to popular events.

Once the opportunity to buy and resell tickets on safe, regulated secondary market platforms disappears, fans will inevitably turn to other channels where no protections exist. That, in turn, creates a prime opportunity for fraudsters to exploit fans through fake listings, counterfeit tickets and scams – precisely the harms regulated platforms are designed to prevent.

This has been tried before and the evidence from abroad should serve as a warning. In the few places that have pursued similar policies, the results are alarming. In Ireland and the Australian state of Victoria, ticket fraud rates are nearly four times higher than in the UK. If the same pattern were repeated here, British fans could be out of pocket by more than £1.2 billion a year thanks to scammers.

Research published just last month by the online safety advice group Get Safe Online found that over half of Britons (55%) cannot confidently determine whether a ticket listing on social media is legitimate. Worryingly, 45% said they would still risk losing money on a social media ticket purchase even if they suspected it might be fake. These findings underline how easily such vulnerabilities can be exploited by bad actors.

Recent consumer outrage over ticket-buying experiences has rightly shown that the ticketing industry must continue to improve and raise standards. But using a blunt instrument such as a price cap will simply not achieve this.

The secondary ticketing market is already heavily regulated. Rather than introducing measures that risk increasing fraud, ministers should instead work with our industry to improve the experience of concertgoers.

Of course, we all want to see effective action against fraud – with the emphasis on ‘effective’. A proper fraud strategy won’t work unless everything the government does points in the same direction. This is not the case with their approach towards ticket reselling – and the losers will simply be those fans who want to see their favourite acts without being preyed on by scammers.

The Government cannot claim to be cracking down on fraud while at the same time introducing policies that push consumers towards the very environments where fraud is most likely to happen.

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Bob Kupbens is the CEO of StubHub International.

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