Steffan Powell, Sian Vivian & Ben Summer
BBC Wales Investigates
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Taylor Swift played to almost 1.2 million people in the UK in 2024 on her two-year, 152-show Eras tour
Ticket touts are employing teams of workers to bulk-buy tickets for the UK’s biggest concerts like Oasis and Taylor Swift so they can be resold for profit, a BBC investigation has found.
We uncovered some touts are making “millions” hiring people overseas, known as “ticket pullers”, with one telling an undercover journalist his team bought hundreds of tickets for Swift’s Eras tour last year.
Our reporter, posing as a would-be tout, secretly recorded the boss of a ticket pulling company in Pakistan who said they could set up a team for us and potentially buy hundreds of tickets.
The UK government plans new legislation to crack down on touts but critics argue it does not go far enough.
Shortly after pre-sale, where a limited number of fans could buy Oasis tickets when they went on sale in August, tickets for their UK gigs were being listed on resale websites like StubHub and Viagogo for more than £6,000 – about 40 times the face value of a standing ticket.
We found genuine fans missed out or, in desperation, ended up paying way over the odds as touts have an army of people working for them to buy tickets for the most in-demand events as soon as they go on sale.
Ali, the boss of the ticket pulling company, boasted to our undercover reporter that he’d been successful at securing tickets for popular gigs.
“I think we had 300 Coldplay tickets and then we had Oasis in the same week – we did great,” he told us.
Ali claimed he knew of a UK tout who made more than £500,000 last year doing this and reckons others are “making millions”.
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Tickets for Oasis’s reunion tour were being listed on resale websites for more than £6,000 – about 40 times the face value – when they went on sale in August
Our research found pullers buy tickets using illegal automated software and multiple identities which could amount to fraud.
Another ticket pulling boss, based in India, told BBC Wales Investigates’ undercover reporter: “If I’m sitting in your country and running my operations in your country, then it is completely illegal.
“We do not participate in illegal things because actually we are outside of the UK.”
A man who worked in the ticketing industry for almost 40 years showed us how he infiltrated a secret online group that claims to have secured thousands of tickets using underhand methods.
Reg Walker said members of the group could generate 100,000 “queue passes” – effectively allowing them to bypass the software that creates an online queue for gigs.
He told the BBC’s The Great Ticket Rip Off programme this was the equivalent of “100,000 people all of a sudden turning up and pushing in front of you in the queue”.
He added: “If you are a ticketing company and an authorised resale company, and someone decides to list hundreds of tickets for a high-demand event.
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