OPINION: How can we hit back at the ticketing touts?

Originally published in The i Paper 27 September 2025. Permission to publish all opinion pieces authored by Rocio Concha, sought and granted on 3 July 2025.

You’ve registered your details and set an alarm for when tickets go on sale. You’ve even browsed potential hotels for overnight accommodation. Your favourite musical act is in town and the group chat is fizzing with excitement. 

Log on to the ticketing site, though, and that’s where things can go flat. 

Tickets that you thought were at a particular price (and in many cases that figure is steep, but it’s a price you’re willing to pay for the experience, you console yourself) have been snapped up, only to return on secondary ticketing sites at an outrageously inflated price. 

Recent examples of this behaviour, where people snap tickets up and resell them for huge profits, are numerous. It’s even been enough for some acts, such as Radiohead, to speak out and condemn touts trying to fleece fans for tickets to their tours. 

When we looked at ticket prices for Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter earlier this summer, we saw that the face value price of tickets on Ticketmaster was between £71.60 - £950. We found tickets listed for all of Beyoncé's six UK dates on both Stubhub and Viagogo the day before the tour's general sale. On Viagogo, the tickets were listed for between £118 and £2,961, while on Stubhub the highest price was a staggering £23,899. 

Clearly, spending that kind of money is a non-starter for pretty much all of us. But the reality is that lots of people do spend a lot more than they bargained for in order to see their favourite artist or band, which means touts’ greed is rewarded. 

To add to pain for fans - buying tickets through secondary sites or social media is fraught with issues. We’ve found that people have shelled out for tickets that were either fake or invalid, meaning they were refused entry at the venue, or the tickets never even arrived in the first place. 

The fact that secondary ticketing sites often appear at the top of Google search results makes it much harder for consumers to decipher which platform is the official ticket seller. Tickets also appear on these sites despite warnings from some artists or event organisers that anyone buying from a secondary seller risks being turned away at the door.

Figures from Action Fraud paint a concerning picture. They reckon financial losses from ticket fraud are on the up, with around £1.6 million reported as lost to this crime in 2024 - more than double the year before. Touts have also been linked to criminal gangs and money-laundering. 

Which? believes that enough is enough. While the government has recently consulted on what controls are needed, including the possibility of some form of price cap, it still has to set out exactly what measures it intends to take to make the industry fairer for fans, which was also a manifesto commitment. 

They should ban touts selling tickets for inflated prices other than the face value plus any fees that were charged when the ticket was bought and make secondary ticket sites responsible for stopping tickets being sold if they won’t be valid at the door. 

Until then, there are some ways you can protect yourself from touts - but it’s important to stay vigilant. Sticking to official ticket and resale sites is important. Official resale partners only allow tickets to be resold at face value or below, meaning you won't pay over the odds and will be guaranteed a legitimate ticket.

Unfortunately, scammers swarm social media in a bid to flog fake tickets, so any offers on those platforms should be avoided. You should never agree to pay for tickets via bank transfer as you won’t get the same protections you do paying with a credit card. 

P.S. Rip offs in the ticketing market  were underlined this week - in this case in the primary rather than secondary ticketing market -  with the Competition and Market Authority’s  decision on Ticketmaster’s selling of Oasis reunion tickets. While it was welcome the regulator got undertakings from Ticketmaster to improve the transparency of its pricing practices, it’ll be disappointing to fans that the regulator didn’t take action to get refunds. Those who felt ripped off when buying Oasis tickets last year will undoubtedly feel let down that Ticketmaster hasn’t been held to account for its past behaviour.