“You’ve sold concert tickets, you’ve sold sports tickets, you’ve sold football tickets, you’ve sold theatre tickets … You’ve made money or you wouldn’t be in this room.”
The voice of Scot Tobias, one of America’s most successful ticket “brokers”, boomed out from the stage. After an hour of drinking and networking, his impassioned pitch was met with cheers by the room full of touts gathered in a subterranean events space in central London.
He was urging them to dip into their pockets to help fund a common cause: the existential fight against the Labour party’s pledge to limit how much a ticket for a concert, sports match or event can be resold for.
His British counterpart, veteran ticket trader Tony McGowen, put it more succinctly. If Labour wins the election, he told the crowd, “bottom line is, we’re all fucked”.
The UK touting industry, seen by many as the parasitic underbelly of the entertainment world, knows that if Labour follows through with its promised 10% cap on the value of resold tickets, their time is up.
The solution, revealed McGowen, was a counter-offensive, but one that would remain hush-hush.
“No one in this room needs to have their name put near anything that we are doing,” he said.
“Everything is done through another source, so don’t worry about identities coming out, because it’s not something that anyone in this room wants and it’ll never happen.”
But undercover filming by the Guardian at that closed-door event can now shed light on the secret plan hatched by a lobbying group that calls itself the Coalition for Ticket Fairness (CTF), which hopes to derail the first ever concerted effort by politicians to stop touts exploiting fans at will.
Among the audience at the private dinner at the Underglobe, next to the Globe theatre on London’s South Bank, in mid-May were touts from an array of backgrounds, as well as representatives of some of the biggest firms in the sector.
There were grizzled old football touts who spend large parts of their lives standing on street corners outside stadiums. One reminisced about the huge sums that were made when Tottenham Hotspur played Liverpool in the 2019 Champions League final in Madrid. “It was going up by £500 a day,” he boasted.
There were web developers who talked of building programs to help them beat genuine fans to tickets by automating the process of buying and selling, or buying email addresses in bulk. This, one boasted, would give him several chances to access pre-sale ticket releases for Taylor Swift’s forthcoming UK tour.
Also in attendance was Michael Mayiger, convicted of a £2m ticket fraud in 2012 but now doing business in the UK via Switzerland-based ticket resale website Gigsberg.
And there were the so-called “trainer kids”, touts of the younger generation who started out cornering the market for in-demand shoes during the pandemic and flogging them for a mark-up online. Having cut their teeth in the shoes game, many have now expanded into the lucrative world of tickets.
At $240, tickets for the event were not cheap. Nor was it widely publicised, with tickets available only via a website whose existence spread largely by word of mouth.
Yet as McGowen had stressed, the touts – and representatives of the resale platforms they use to ply their trade – flocked to the venue to respond to the existential threat.
Led by Tobias, CTF representatives staged a whip-round, going from table to table urging the guests – more than 100 of them – to “pony up”. The pledges came thick and fast, thousands of pounds at a time. Each new pledge was greeted with applause and vocal praise, apparently to encourage the others.
Within about 15 minutes, CTF had raised more than £73,000, which its representatives promised would go towards paying an expert lobbyist to “guide parliament” and scupper any attempt to rein in their business.
Labour’s proposals, expected to feature in its general election manifesto, are a response to years of controversy surrounding business practices in the ticketing world that run the full gamut, from ethically questionable to outright illegal.
As the Observer revealed in 2016, an alliance of street-smart touts and corporations has supercharged ticket trading in the UK, taking advantage of any artists and promoters who charge their fans less than they could, given the huge demand.
The amount of money those artists leave on the table has proved so appealing that touts have gone to great lengths to get hold of it.
The Guardian has previously revealed how some use fake identities, multiple credit cards, or computer bots to harvest and resell tickets at the expense of fans.
They have targeted gigs in aid of cancer charities by Ed Sheeran and the comedian Peter Kay, or sold tickets to events where resale was banned by the venue or promoter, leading to fans who bought ticket from touts being denied entry.
Others have brazenly sold football tickets, which was made illegal as part of crowd safety improvements brought in after the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster.
Often, tickets have been sold with incorrect or incomplete information, meaning fans were not getting what they thought they were buying.
But as touts and resale platforms tested the boundaries of what was legally allowable, and grew in sophistication, the gears of regulation and enforcement slowly started grinding. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) was forced to step in, issuing a court order in November 2018 demanding that Viagogo – the biggest player in the UK – comply with consumer regulations.
While some touts have sailed close to the wind, others have resorted to plain old fraud.
Peter Hunter and David Smith were convicted and jailed over an £11m ticket scheme in 2020, while a group of touts – including the so-called Ticket Queen, Maria Chenery-Woods – were sentenced last week over a £6.5m fraud.
One had boasted, according to court transcripts, that he had “rinsed some twat on [Viagogo] today”.
Consumers were seldom discussed, if at all, at the CTF dinner, with the chance to sway MPs the main topic of conversation.
Speaking to the crowd, McGowen said interventions by the CMA and National Trading Standards had “only happened because we didn’t have a voice in parliament”.
McGowen is the UK chair of CTF and the sole director of its UK outpost, a company incorporated in February, according to Companies House filings.
The CTF says that it was not so much preparing a lobbying blitz as “bringing the industry together to share insights”. The group believes that restrictions on touting will only fuel the black market.
Its US representatives talked of how they had successfully influenced the law in the US, where ticket touting, known there as “scalping”, is rampant. Now, it seems, they hope to repeat the trick.
But if they fail, some of the touts who coughed up at CTF’s fundraiser might – like consumers sold a duff ticket – be asking for their money back.
