Yahoo Finance Fake Taylor Swift tickets: Why you shouldn't spend more than $1,373
Anyone selling Taylor Swift tickets for more than 10% of the original price could be breaking the law.
Tickets for the Australian tour of the highly anticipated Taylor Swift concert, are a hot commodity – and ticket scalpers know it.
Limited VIP packages to Swift's Sydney and Melbourne shows went on sale on Monday, and scalpers wasted no time in exploiting the high demand, seeking to resell the tickets at excessively high mark-ups.
Research by CHOICE found that tickets to the Sydney concert were being sold for prices as high as $2,678 per ticket on the reselling website Viagogo. Another major ticket reselling website, The Ticket Merchant, was reselling tickets for up to $1,999 each.
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There is a legal limit to ticket price hiking
The original sale price for the VIP packages - sold through the official ticket seller, Ticketek - were as high as $1,249.
Anti-scalping legislation in NSW prevents the reselling of tickets for more than 10 per cent above the original price. So, the resold tickets on Viagogo and The Ticket Merchant were possibly in breach of the law, CHOICE found.
A 10 per cent increase on the original Ticketek price would be $1,373.
The Ticket Merchant told CHOICE it had a compliance team which monitored the website and removed listings in breach of state legislation.
"If a ticket is sold in breach of these legislations, the customer is refunded on identification of the breach," the spokesperson said.
"Taylor Swift has a huge number of face-value price points, with tickets available to be purchased from multiple sources. All of these allocations often come in with different price points, which makes policing listing quite difficult.
"The process we follow is to ask the seller to provide the face value when listing and, if something doesn't appear to be in compliance, we ask for evidence and remove the listing.”
Fines of up to $110,000
According to the NSW Office of Fair Trading, the maximum penalties for breaching ticket-scalping laws are $110,000 for a corporation or $22,000 for an individual.
CHOICE head of policy and government relations Patrick Veyret said the conduct was "disappointing and shocking".
"This appears to be a flagrant disregard of ticket-scalping laws in New South Wales. The conduct should firmly be in the crosshairs of consumer-protection regulators," Veyret said.
Aussies warned to watch out for fake tickets
On top of inflated prices, CHOICE has reported extensively on customers who purchased tickets through reselling websites only to never receive them, receive fake tickets, or be turned away at the venue. In NSW, the ticket issuer can also cancel the ticket resold as a part of state legislation.
It's why consumers should steer clear of unauthorised ticket resellers and only buy tickets from the official website or official reseller. In the case of the Swift concert, Ticketek said there would be an official reselling website from September onwards.
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