The rush to buy music tickets for popular concerts is always major and due to this there are always many people who are left without tickets, they are consequently disappointed. Some fans choose to give hope of seeing the concert, although some will turn to the Internet in order to attempt to purchase the tickets. Ethical ticket sites online and even Ebay have proven to be suitable sources for tickets for some fans.
Although thousands of music fans have been conned by an online Internet scam which presented itself as a genuine seller of concert tickets. Fans bought tickets off this website to some of the most popular gigs including Take That, Adele and the Artic Monkeys. The website, www.ticketindex.net made a promise to buyers that they could secure the tickets and some fans paid up to £250 per ticket.
Despite paying out money for the tickets, the tickets actually never tuned up, it is believed the website earned in excess of £1 million from fraudulent ticket sales. An investigation was started by the fraud squad in the UK after hundreds of fans who had attempted to purchase Take That tickets reported the website to the Government’s fraud hotline.
There are around seven hundred individual complaints that are being investigated in regards to this website, although the fraud squad believe that several thousand people have been ripped off by this website. Some fans have lost large sums of money from buying tickets in bulk, there have been complaints of up to £2,000 being lost.
The highest amount of complaints relate to the Take That concert which was sold out to such an extent that the band chose to put on a further eight concerts in Manchester. This tour was huge and over 1.75 million fans watched the concert in one weekend at Croke Park.
Those who have be conned by the website stated that the site looked very professional. Card payments were taken for tickets and then a voice recorded message informed buyers that tickets would be delivered ten days before the concert. Although obviously the tickets never arrived and therefore many fans were left bitterly disappointed.