A new law is cracking down hard on ticket touts

A new piece of UK legislation has been introduced this week making it illegal to use automated bots to bulk purchase event tickets.

Technology of this kind has commonly been used by touts to buy up large quantities of tickets to sell on at exorbitant prices. A recent estimation assessed the UK ticket reselling business to be worth £1 billion per year, with £500 million of that number credited to music events.

Now under the terms of the newly legislated Digital Economy Act, anyone caught utilising bots to play the system and exploit genuine fans can face unlimited fines.

The Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries Matt Hancock said: “We’re determined to make sure 2018 is the year we help real fans get the chance to see their favourite music and sports stars at a fair price.

“We’ll be acting to stamp out the growing problem of touts misusing technology to scoop up vast numbers of tickets only to sell them on at rip-off prices.

“Our work, together with improvements by industry, will help make the market more transparent and mean a great year for Britain’s thriving live events scene.”

The law follows raids on the offices of ticket reselling companies StubHub and Viagogo in November last year which resulted in four arrests for suspected breach of consumer laws related to ticket touting.

Google has also recently imposed restrictions against such sites, including barring them from claiming to be “official” ticket sources and requiring them to be certified to use Google’s AdWords service to buy higher search ranking positions.

[Via: NME]

Patrick Hinton is Mixmag's Digital Staff Writer, follow him on Twitter