Internet ticket touts who used bots to buy thousands of tickets to events are guilty of fraud

Two internet ticket touts who re-sold tickets to top music concerts for a profit of almost £7million have been found guilty of fraud following a landmark trial.

Peter Hunter, 51, and David Smith, 66, used multiple identities and computer bots to buy £4 million worth of tickets to high-profile acts such as Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran over two-and-a-half years.

The pair – who traded as Ticket Wiz and BZZ – sold the tickets to a secondary websites for £10.8 million, prosecutors told Leeds Crown Court.

The prosecution is the first of its kind in the UK since National Trading Standards began investigating the reselling of tickets on the internet in 2017.

David Smith (pictured) used multiple identities and computer bots to buy £4 million worth of tickets

Peter Hunter (left) and David Smith (right) used multiple identities and computer bots to buy £4 million worth of tickets to high-profile concerts 

During a three-month trial prosecution, barristers said the pair were ‘internet ticket-touts’ who harvested and resold large numbers of tickets to a range of events including West End hits like Harry Potter And The Cursed Child.

They sold the tickets on secondary ticketing sites, including the ‘big four’ – Viagogo, GetMein, StubHub and Seatwave – at inflated prices, the prosecution said.

Ed Sheeran’s manager Stuart Camp gave evidence in December, when he told the jury he had spotted £75 seats for a charity gig on sale for £7,000. 

Jonathan Sandiford, prosecuting, told the jury that Hunter and Smith were ‘dishonest fraudsters motivated by greed’.

But Hunter, who’s originally from Dublin, and Smith, who’s from London, argued that they did nothing wrong.

Hunter’s defence team told the jury that they were a trusted and reliable source of tickets and pointed to the thousands of positive reviews Hunter had when he started out selling on eBay.

Ben Douglas-Jones QC, for Hunter, said that his client was no more greedy than other businessmen providing a service.

During a three-month trial prosecution, barristers said the pair were 'internet ticket-touts' who harvested and resold large numbers of tickets to a range of events such as Taylor Swift (pictured)

During a three-month trial prosecution, barristers said the pair were ‘internet ticket-touts’ who harvested and resold large numbers of tickets to a range of events such as Taylor Swift (pictured)

He said the prosecution’s focus on high-profile, high sought-after events missed the fact that sellers like Hunter, who is originally from Dublin, provided a valuable service to acts who struggled to sell out venues.

He argued that his service allowed punters to find tickets who find it difficult to be available to buy from the primary sellers in the tiny windows when tickets are issued.

Peter Hunter, who is originally from Dublin, told his trial how he was working as a chef in London when, in 2000, a waitress he worked with asked him to buy four Madonna tickets for her as she did not have a credit card.

He said he bought six more and sold the £50 tickets on eBay for more than £100 each.

After this, he started to sell tickets on a regular basis on eBay and set-up up Ticket Whiz in 2004. He used eBay until the website stopped allowing direct secondary ticketing and he progressed to using a range of secondary websites.

Hunter said he started out buying six to eight tickets at a time and David Smith buying the same. But he then started using family and friends’ cards before developing a portfolio of identities and using technology to hoover up tickets.

Ed Sheeran’s manager Stuart Camp (pictured) gave evidence in December, when he told the jury he had spotted £75 seats for a charity gig on sale for £7,000.

They sold the tickets on secondary ticketing sites, with Ed Sheeran (pictured) tickets going for up to £7,000

Ed Sheeran’s manager Stuart Camp (pictured) gave evidence in December, when he told the jury he had spotted £75 seats for a charity gig on sale for £7,000. 

Mr Douglas-Jones said his client did not shirk from the fact that some of his actions breached terms and conditions of the primary ticket sellers. 

But he said that this did not constitute a criminal offence and told the jury it was known across the industry that many of the T&Cs were unenforceable.

He told the jury: ‘We live in a society where things are bought and sold. They are only sold at a price which people are willing to pay for them.’

Hunter, 51, and Smith, 66, of Crossfield Road, north London, were both found guilty of fraudulent trading and possessing an article for fraud on Thursday.

Judge Mushtaq Khokhar told Hunter and Smith they will be sentenced on Monday, February 24, at 2pm.

He said: ‘Just because I’m granting you bail does not mean to say that a custodial sentence is not open to the court.’

A leading ticket fraud expert says the convictions of Peter Hunter and David Smith should spark a wider criminal investigation into the re-selling of tickets.

Reg Walker, from The Iridium Consultancy, said the prosecution of the men was ‘ground-breaking’ but should be just the beginning.

He said: ‘This verdict means that many of the tickets sold through resale platforms such as StubHub and Viagogo were acquired unlawfully and that these companies may be reasonably suspected of benefiting from the proceeds of crime.

‘There should now be a full criminal investigation into these platforms and their relationship with ticket touts acquiring and reselling tens of thousands of tickets in the same manner.’

Mr Walker said: ‘This should be the start of an investigation, not the end.’

And he said: ‘This is one step, albeit a huge step, in giving fans a much better chance of getting tickets at face value.’

Mr Walker said Hunter was one of the biggest touts operating in the UK in terms of the volume of tickets he was selling, but added: ‘There are literally hundreds like Hunter out there.’

Mr Walker said the long-running trial had exposed new evidence about the close relationship between touts and the secondary ticketing giants.

He said: ‘Why was a little man from Tottenham, with no allocation, able to purchase tens of thousand of tickets and sell them at hiked-up prices?

‘They did not want to know. And that needs to be investigated.’

RE-SELLING OF TICKETS BY TOUTS WORTH UP TO £700M IN UK

Re-selling tickets for major music and cultural events is a huge and controversial market.

Anyone who has tried to book seats to see major music stars or blockbuster stage productions knows the frustration of failure only to find the same tickets for sale on so-called secondary sites, often at much inflated prices.

For some, the ability to re-sell tickets at whatever price the market will support is a legitimate expression of free commerce which spreads opportunities for people to attend events or dispose of unwanted tickets.

For many others – including some of the most famous names in entertainment – touts using multiple identities and technology to gobble up dozens of tickets before ‘real’ punters get their chance are simply ripping-off legitimate fans.

Ed Sheeran is perhaps the most prominent international artist who has spoken out about the problems of secondary ticketing and tried to find ways to beat the touts at his gigs. 

The prosecution of Hunter and Smith is a first for National Trading Standards, who began to investigate bulk ticket re-sellers in April 2017.

But the UK authorities have spent years investigating concerns about the secondary ticketing market and trying to force change on the major players, including the so-called Big Four websites – Viagogo, StubHub, GetMeIn and Seatwave.

GetMeIn and Seatwave, which were owned by one of the biggest players in the primary ticket selling market – Ticketmaster – have subsequently closed down.

And, at the end of last year, the size of these businesses was underlined when Viagogo launched a takeover of StubHub for a reported 4 billion (£3.1 billion) – a move the New York Times said would ‘create a behemoth in the growing market for ticket re-sales’.

The re-selling of tickets by touts is thought to be worth up to £700 million in the UK alone.

The now-defunct Office of Fair Trading first published a report on the secondary ticketing industry in 2005 and its successor, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has spent almost a decade grappling with the Big Four over their practices.

At various stages the firms have given undertakings to give improved information to buyers about the tickets listed on their sites – information including if there are restrictions that could result in buyers being denied access to an event and people should know if the seller is a business or an event organiser.

But the CMA was forced to take high-profile court action against Viagogo when it ignored the authority.

Last month, the CMA issued its latest warning, telling StubHub it could be breaking consumer law and telling the company to make changes to its website or risk court action.

The authority said it is concerned that the re-seller ‘is not complying with commitments it made to clean up its site’.

  

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