I am always slightly bemused by the feedback from concert sellers that they don’t send out tickets to people until the last minute to prevent people copying and ending up with a high quantity of fakes on the market. Instead what has happened is a multimillion pound fraud industry has arisen surrounding the sale of concert tickets. The tickets appear on Ebay and ticket resellers, along with such lines as ‘I bought too many tickets’ or ‘ My friend and his wife can’t come’ but the caveat is always that they will send you the tickets when they arrive as they simply don’t have them yet.
Surely in todays technology generation there is a way to limit the fakes, microchips? Barcodes? Watermarks? Tickets should be delivered as soon as they are purchased, but this isn’t the real problem in my opinion. The real problem to be quite honest are the fans, it doesn’t really matter what the organisers and genuine ticket sellers do, there will always be fans who are naive enough to be swept along in a story for a chance to see their favourite group play on stage. There are still people out there who think being a Limited Company registered at companies house means something, affords them some protection and that a website with an authorised reseller logo means their money will be safe. Even the ticket sellers can’t tell which websites are genuine, so a simple rule to follow is whenever you buy something like this ‘use a creditcard’ it won’t stop the feeling of disappointment but you will at least get your money back.
As a last thought you don’t hear of these sorts of problems with travel tickets or football tickets very often so maybe the promoters need to look at why that is.
