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Buying a ticket for a big event? You don’t stand a chance against the ticket bots

Money/Armies of 'ticket bots' are turning sport into a big rip-off
Secondary ticket sites are making huge profits from high-profile sporting events

Roll up for the big ticket sell-off. Or should that be rip-off?

Two tickets for the forthcoming London derby between Arsenal and Chelsea? That would be £1,817.40 please, via a Madrid-based website called livefootballtickets.com, up from a combined face value of £163.60.

You want to attend Saturday’s Six Nations showdown between England and France at Twickenham?

Well, there were some prime seats listed on Viagogo on Monday afternoon for £808 apiece, despite a £50 face value.

The possibility of seeing Luke Littler in Sunday’s darts Masters final? There were a few tickets near the front being offered for £295 (an uplift of more than 500 per cent on the original £49 price) before Littler was unexpectedly knocked out in the quarter-finals.

And how about two of the great venues of British sport? Debenture seats for the men’s singles Wimbledon final are currently being advertised for as much as £10,748, while a night at snooker’s version of Centre Court – the Crucible Theatre – for the World Championship final could set you back £1,184, despite an original face value of £165.

And so it goes on, as only a cursory journey through the now dozens of secondary ticket sites will tell you.

Hi-tech program created ‘industrial-scale’ problem

According to one industry expert, we are now at stage four of the ticket-tout story. Stage one was when people queued up at a box office and you then had the tout on the street corner with a pocket full of physical tickets or pound notes. Stage two arrived with the internet and the emergence of the “bedroom tout”, who would buy and sell from behind a computer. Next came mass mobile phone use and a further new immediacy and flexibility. But no transition has been more significant (and arguably damaging) as the development of Ticket Bots; highly sophisticated online software that helps buyers to hoover up swathes of tickets. “The bot has allowed industrial scale touting,” explains Tim Payton, a ticketing expert, who has advised both the Government and various sports governing bodies on the issue.

The Rugby Football Union has this year even produced a stark warning video for people attending Six Nations matches and it stresses that reselling tickets at inflated prices contravenes their terms and conditions. “Anyone caught… faces serious sanctions, such as tickets being cancelled at no refund and memberships being suspended – you will also be stopped from buying tickets for future games,” says the message.

You only have to look at some of the eye-watering mark-ups and sheer volume of advertised tickets to understand why secondary sites have so proliferated. Yes, there is still sometimes a genuine need for genuine fans to resell tickets that they no longer want or can use. But it is also clear that something is amiss when marquee events are selling out at breakneck speed before numerous tickets are immediately then advertised on secondary sites at extraordinary prices.

The odds, says one industry insider, are stacked in favour of the bot, with the software (which is openly advertised for sale online) set up to automatically access multiple browsers in the time any normal human might type the first few letters of their name. The bots also scan the internet to instantly buy any reasonably priced resales. It has left some touts so confident that they will even start advertising tickets before they have gone on official sale.

This contributes to other major problems and Telegraph Sport has heard of multiple examples of fans buying a ticket from a secondary site or online trading platform only to have the ticket cancelled or moved at the last minute. Even worse, numerous fans have stories of arriving at a venue only to discover that their ticket does not even exist. The trend has left the promoter Barry Hearn seeming almost to yearn for the days when all he had to worry about was the street-corner tout.

“The old-school tout dealt with what they had; they would take a punt and sometimes they would lose money,” Hearn tells Telegraph Sport. “Now it’s far worse. There are organised internet hacking teams – armies of people. It’s major business – they make a fortune – and it is bad news for fans. The biggest problem is people advertising tickets for sale that don’t exist.”

Fans at the World Darts Championship at Alexandra Palace on January 2, 2025/Armies of 'ticket bots' are turning sport into a big rip-off
Fans at Alexandra Palace enjoyed the World Darts Championship but plenty were locked out because they had inadvertently bought fake tickets - James Fearn/Getty Images Europe

At the recent sell-out World Darts Championship, Hearn estimates that between 30 and 50 fans were arriving at Alexandra Palace each evening only to discover that their “tickets” either did not exist or had already been legitimately sold.

“It’s horrendous – try telling that to 30 people who have paid for a train fare and hotel,” he says. “We have people outside the venue trying to buy tickets because they have got customers they have already sold tickets to. It’s a problem every night – and a problem we should not have to be sorting.” Of those people finding ways to sell tickets that they do not then have, Hearn said: “It’s an organised crime.”

Resellers exploiting legal loophole

There are also significant knock-ons when the seller does legitimately deliver on the tickets. Hearn is adamant that prices must remain affordable to the core fan, but knowing that £40 tickets are being routinely resold for £350 is hard to ignore. It creates a temptation for an ordinary punter to further inflate the market rather than use the official face value resale facility. It also only weighs the scales towards eventually moving events from historic but relatively smaller venues such as Alexandra Palace or the Crucible. “We know we could sell at least three times the number [for both the world darts and world snooker],” says Hearn. “The number of people we are disappointing is humongous. Bigger venues will take business away from the secondary sites.”

Some argue that this is all simply market forces and, should a fan want to pay vast amounts to watch an event, then why should anyone else care? It is, they say, simple supply and demand and there have been warnings that new regulation could drive the resale market completely underground. The counter argument is that this is all not only pricing many real fans out of sporting events, but placing vast sums of money in the pockets of touts that could otherwise be invested back into a sport.

“Take a cricket-mad supporter,” says Payton. “They will set aside a certain budget to attend cricket matches over a season. If touts buy up all the tickets and that fan is forced to pay £320 for a £70 ticket, that is £250 forever lost from being reinvested in the sport. The fan will also get to enjoy less cricket. It is also important from a counter-terrorism and security point of view to know who is inside a venue. Ticket touting undermines that.”

It became illegal following the Hillsborough disaster to resell football tickets in this country without the express permission of the club, of which some have had arrangements with secondary ticket sites. Telegraph Sport revealed earlier this week that the Chelsea owner Todd Boehly is a director of a US-based online marketplace called Vivid Seats, which hosted adverts strictly for overseas fans to buy Premier League tickets. There is no indication that Boehly has acted illegally in any way, however. The website also does not permit UK sellers.

It is not illegal to resell tickets for other sporting or cultural events in this country, but event organisers do often prohibit this as part of their terms and conditions. This means that sports governing bodies can cancel tickets for breach of contract if they see them being advertised elsewhere. The big problem, however, is that secondary sites may only specify a row or a block inside a venue rather than a specific seat. This is despite the Consumer Rights Act of 2015, which states that a seller must provide specific seat information as well as the face-value price.

“If we see a site advertising at more than face value, we cancel the ticket and we put them back on the market at list price,” says Hearn. “We have whole teams doing this. But to cancel tickets we need to know – which I believe is a government rule – the advertised seat number. And these people [the touts] are not idiots, so they go on with something like, ‘in the first six rows’, which means we can’t cancel it because we have no idea which seat it is. There’s lax enforcement. It is so easy to take away the market. The solution is, ‘show us your seat number’.”

A further huge complication for enforcement is that many of the sites are located outside of the UK and so the online servers, as well as company directors, are registered in a different jurisdiction. Trading standards can issue fines for rule breaches but, with so much money potentially to be made, Payton says that “punishments are so low they are just seen as a cost of business”. Welcoming renewed political focus on this issue, he adds that “legislation covering ticket touting desperately needs updating and then, most importantly, it needs proper enforcement”.

Government preparing to take action

Following the outcry over the sale of Oasis tickets (widely now available across secondary sites), the Government launched a new consultation last month. They are promising to tackle what they call “greedy ticket touts” and will consider a 30 per cent price cap on ticket resale, limits on how many tickets one seller can advertise on the resale market, a new licensing regime and heavier fines. “For too long fans have endured the misery of touts hoarding and reselling tickets to our most popular sporting events at vastly inflated prices … we have been clear that time is up for ticket touts,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

Dynamic pricing – whereby even official ticket sellers can vastly increase prices according to demand – will also be considered in the light of the Oasis fiasco. This sort of model has been rare in sport but, perhaps ominously, is being used for the Fifa Club World Cup (which involves Manchester City and Chelsea) in the United States this summer. What is also called “price adaptation” is a relatively common business practice in the US, which will also co-host the 2026 World Cup with Mexico and Canada. Fifa is yet to confirm next year’s arrangements but remaining “general public” tickets for the Club World Cup final in New York were listed on Tuesday by Ticketmaster (via the Fifa website) at a low of $613.25 (£494) at the back of the 82,500-capacity MetLife Stadium, all the way up to $6,137.70 (£4,950) for a seat near one of the corner flags.

“Dynamic pricing models are just the latest way in which some are determined to exploit the loyalty of football supporters, without any recognition of the downsides on atmosphere, occasion and attendance,” says Tom Greatrex, chair of the Football Supporters’ Association (FSA).

Of the wider resale issue in the UK – particularly the fraudulent sale of counterfeit tickets – there is hope that technology could ultimately solve an issue that technology has so indirectly magnified.

Angus Bujalski, who is the RFU’s executive director of legal and governance, tells Telegraph Sport that digital ticketing had helped identify suspicious activity. “This tracking has enabled investigations relating to international rugby ticket fraud and we have successfully obtained injunctions against prolific ticket touts,” he says. “We have also assisted the police in prosecuting fraudulent sellers of tickets and hospitality, resulting in convictions of fraud and money-laundering offences.” Another industry expert raised the future prospect of facial recognition, in the same way as passport controls, although this would prompt questions around civil liberties. Individual sports have also increasingly formed member clubs which, alongside other benefits, provide pre-general sale access to tickets. The bots, however, even seem capable of penetrating these schemes.

With its preservation of the Wimbledon queue – and a £20-£30 ground pass – the All England Club has at least one supremely effective way of beating the bots and believes that its public ballot remains the fairest way of allocating tickets. Wimbledon tickets on secondary sites are currently their premium debenture seats, which are freely transferable, whether as gifts or to sell on. They have become vital to the All England Club’s business model and it is accepted that the secondary market is crucial to upholding the value of what are respectively 2,520 and 1,250 seats on Centre and No 1 Court. The cost of a Centre Court debenture from 2026 until 2030 is £116,000 (or £1,657 a day), up from £80,000 over the current five-year period.

Telegraph Sport contacted a number of secondary ticketing sites for comment. Only Viagogo – which merged with StubHub in 2021 and now has its headquarters in Switzerland – responded.

Spectators queue up outside the gates prior to day one of The Championships, Wimbledon 2023/Armies of 'ticket bots' are turning sport into a big rip-off
The Wimbledon queue is one of the few remaining methods of circumventing online resellers - Julian Finney/Getty Images Europe

Viagogo stressed that it would constructively engage with the Government’s consultation and said that it provided “a safe, secure and regulated marketplace”, with sellers setting their prices and ticket values ultimately decided by fans. “Resale is highly regulated in the UK,” said a Viagogo spokesperson, adding that “anti-competitive actions taken by event organisers to restrict purchasing and resale options to certain platforms is an attempt to control the market, limiting fan choice.” They also said that the on-sale process of original ticket sellers was “often confusing and lengthy” and argued that the secondary market provides “crucial flexibility for buyers”.

Viagogo said that sellers using their platform must provide seat information and that it would investigate and, if appropriate, update if notified of a listing that did not comply with the law. Industry insiders say that it should be impossible for listings to appear on any secondary site without the required seat information.

Viagogo said that it removes known speculative listings, employs software that reviews every listing for potential fraud and has stressed that sellers do not receive any payment until the buying fan has accessed the event. It was also pointed out that the highest advertised prices are naturally those which have not yet found a buyer. “We ensure fans receive their tickets in time for the event and in the rare event of an issue, we offer them replacement tickets or their money back,” said a spokesperson. “We follow all governing legislation.”