Ticket resale 'deception'

Viagogo sends gig tickets along with copy of stranger's passport

- Rob Davies

When Danny bought tickets to see Deftones in Crystal Palace Park, he was not expecting to be initiated into an apparent subterfuge.

Yet shortly before the south London gig, Viagogo, the resale platform that sold him the tickets, sent him a scanned copy of a passport ID page belonging to a Dutch man he had never met. A Viagogo staff member told Danny to flash the document if asked by door staff for the ID of the "lead booker".

"It felt like we were being asked to take part in a deliberate deception," said Danny, who has asked for his name to be changed. "I know it's not the world's biggest crime but I run a business and it's not a good look."

Danny's experience underscores the difficulties fans face amid opaque and questionable business practices in reselling tickets for UK events, as Labour closes in on a long-promised clampdown on the industry. He was not the only one who received the ID instruction. In an apparent breach of data protection laws, Viagogo mistakenly copied him into an email with several strangers, all of whom received a link to the same scanned passport.

The reason for this curious pre-gig ritual is that Ticketmaster, the primary ticket agent for the Deftones gig, had expressly forbidden unauthorised resale in its terms and conditions. To get round this, evidence seen by the Guardian indicates, Viagogo arranged the sale on its own platform. Viagogo then appears to have told the seller to send the tickets through Ticketmaster's own transfer systems, which are intended for groups of friends to share tickets between them at face value.

But the face on the passport was not a friend of Danny's.

In fact, according to a ticketing expert, Reg Walker, the seller was a well-known tout and prolific user of ticket-buying "bots", software deployed to harvest tickets illegally and resell them for big profits.