‘The Great Ticket Scandal’ programme sent undercover reporters to fan-to-fan website Viagogo which claims to allow music fans to sell tickets they can no longer use to other fans.
It found the majority of tickets offered on Viagogo were allocated by promoters or large-scale professional ticket resellers, rather than being sold by genuine fans, and sold at well above their face value.
The programme claims major promoters allocated thousands of tickets to be sold this way, including tickets for recent gigs by Coldplay, Rihanna, Westlife, Take That and V Festival.
‘The Great Ticket Scandal’ also alleges that Viagogo staff compete directly with fans to buy in-demand tickets from sites such as Ticketmaster as soon as they go on sale, using multiple credit cards registered to different addresses to avoid systems put in place to prevent bulk ticket purchases.
Viagogo attempted to bring an injunction against Channel 4 but it was dropped in the High Court yesterday (22 February), enabling the programme to be broadcast.
Channel 4 said: "Channel 4 has defeated an injunction in the High Court and can now reveal an important public interest investigation into how real fans are paying the price for hidden practices used by live event promoters and a major fan-to-fan ticket exchange."
A Channel 4 spokesperson added: "We are pleased that we can now broadcast in full a programme of important public interest. It is disappointing that having provided Viagogo with a fair opportunity to respond to the allegations uncovered by our investigation several weeks ago, they chose instead to seek an injunction which would have effectively stopped the broadcast of our programme."
Edward Parkinson, UK director of Viagogo said: "Viagogo exists to provide a safe, secure marketplace for the buying and selling of live event tickets. The vast majority of sellers are individuals, and around half of tickets sold sell for face value or less. To ensure we can offer our customers the best seats possible, we have on occasion partnered with promoters or artists as this enables us to go above and beyond for our customers."
He added that the injunction had be sought to prevent customer information being made public. "Our number one priority is to protect our customers’ data, so we will always do whatever we can to prevent that information from falling into the wrong hands," he said.
The programme will air at 9pm tonight on Channel 4.
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