Metropolitan Police call for tougher action on ticket fraud

Written on Tue 19 Feb 2013

The Met has published its Problem Profile on Ticket Fraud.

In their report they recommend that:-

• Consideration must be given to introducing legislation to govern the unauthorised sale of event tickets. The lack of legislation in this area enables fraud and places the public at risk of economic crime.
• The primary and secondary ticket market require regulation to ensure transparency, allowing consumers to understand who they are buying from and affording them better protection from ticket crime.
• Law enforcement needs to strengthen relationships with website registrars and hosting companies across the world so that requests to suspend websites are complied with immediately and without the need for a court order.
• All victims of ticket fraud need to be encouraged to report to the authorities so that the true scale of this crime can be gauged.
• Action Fraud needs to be better publicised as the primary reporting agency for ticket fraud.
• As Operation Podium closes, the ticket industry needs to build relationships with search engine companies, UK Payments, the British Bankers’ Association, website hosts and website registrars, so as to prevent and mitigate against ticket crime.
• Tax investigation by HMRC may be a viable way to target ticket fraudsters and touts with unaccounted wealth.
• To disrupt fraudulent websites a range of tactics need to be employed, including removing merchant facilities, suspending websites, terminating websites’ email addresses and telephone numbers, and requesting that search engines relegate fraudulent websites to the bottom of their page rankings.
• Event organisers should include a ‘website checker’ on their websites, where members of the public can check to see if websites are official ticket sellers.
• The public need to be reminded by promoters when tickets are released for events to only buy tickets from official sites (and these sites need to be publicised).
• Merchant acquirers should be encouraged to delay how quickly ticket companies can withdraw funds from their merchant accounts, giving them more chance of recovering funds if tickets are not supplied.
• Law enforcement should seek to have banning orders or serious crime prevention orders placed on known ticket touts, so they are excluded from areas close to venues and from engaging in ticket related activity.

Scarlet Mist welcomes this report and hopes that the government will implement it in full. You can read the report in full here.