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BusinessSeptember 25, 2021

Dodgy tickets, huge mark-ups – what is Viagogo really up to?

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Offshore touts are trying to flog off expensive tickets to concerts all over New Zealand. And sometimes those tickets may not even exist. What can be done to stop it?

Adam Webb is hovering over his keyboard, frantically searching for information. He has multiple internet tabs open and fake credit cards laid out on the table in front of him. It’s just after 6am in London, and he’s fresh out of bed, only on his first coffee. But his fingers fly across the keyboard. He’s in the zone – and I don’t dare interrupt him. 

“Here’s one,” he says. “It’s a tiny little house in Dundee, Scotland.” Webb clicks his mouse, taps his keyboard, and gets another result. “Here are more tickets being listed by another company in Albuquerque, USA.” Another pause. “Here’s another one in Israel.” He looks up at me, staring back wide-eyed through a Zoom window, and declares: “It’s deeply suspicious.”

You’re probably wondering what’s going on. I am too. Webb contacted me after I wrote this story urging Lorde fans not to buy tickets for her upcoming New Zealand tour through Viagogo. VIP tickets for $1300 had appeared on the ticket resale site, yet Lorde doesn’t offer VIP tickets, and doesn’t charge $1300. Most of her summer shows will set fans back around $100. After an outcry, Viagogo removed them.

Lorde
Tickets for Lorde’s upcoming New Zealand tour are available on Viagogo for much higher resale prices. Photo: Getty

Webb got in touch to let me know he was watching all of this closely. Based in London, his main job is in music publicity, but he spends his spare time running Fanfair Alliance, a not-for-profit organisation that educates ticket buyers and campaigns for major reforms. In the UK, the home of premier league football, ticket resale companies are big business, with several major players in the market.

Lately, though, Viagogo has been firmly in his sights. That’s because it’s constantly making headlines. You’ve probably heard about the company before. Perhaps you’ve bought tickets off the site. Maybe those tickets were fine, and you had a great night. Maybe those tickets were useless and you were left standing outside a stadium, a few hundred dollars missing from your pocket, listening to the applause as everyone else enjoys the show.

That happens regularly. Recent New Zealand shows by UK comic Russell Howard and local pop bigwigs Six60, as well as tours by the Van Gogh Alive exhibit and The Great Moscow Circus, all sparked headlines over fans buying overpriced tickets, some that they later discovered were “worthless”. 

Despite writing about Viagogo regularly over the past decade, I realised I didn’t fully understand how it operated. I asked Webb if he’d show me. “I’d be happy to,” he said. So we set up a Zoom call and dived in. He opened up multiple international versions of Viagogo, pulled out fake credit cards so he could pretend to buy tickets, and walked me through it. 

On its website, Viagogo calls itself “a global online platform for live sport, music and entertainment tickets”. It started in 2006, and operates out of London and Switzerland. A spokesperson told me: “A high volume of tickets are sold on Viagogo across the world every day and our platform exists to ensure that buyers receive valid tickets on time for the event, and sellers are paid.” Webb agrees that the company, like eBay, Trade Me, and Ticketmaster’s own secondary site, Ticketmaster Resale,  “connects buyers and sellers”. 

But that’s where the comparisons diverge, claims Webb. “In reality, Viagogo is dependent upon two things: one is Google advertising, so every time you search for tickets, they pay to be at the top of your search,” he says. “The second is the tickets are not sold by you and me, and they’re not sold by consumers.” Webb claims the vast majority of tickets sold on Viagogo are listed by large-scale ticket touts. “It’s a scalping machine, basically.”

Webb doesn’t stop there. He believes fake ticket listings can be widely found on Viagogo. To prove this, he starts examining listings for Lorde’s upcoming run of New Zealand shows – six outdoor concerts across February and March, including a headlining performance at Christchurch festival Electric Avenue. “If I Google ‘Electric Avenue music festival’ Viagogo will pay to top the Google search results,” he says.

Webb pulls up Viagogo’s ticket offerings for Lorde’s February 26 appearance and finds multiple listings, all from overseas-based sellers. Some of those tickets are priced at more than $1000 – 10 times the face value. “This is not someone who’s going to this event – this is a business,” says Webb. He types in the numbers for his fake credit card to locate the sellers. One was in Dundee, a mid-sized city in Scotland. 

Shihad
Tickets for Shihad’s upcoming Auckland show were available on Viagogo before the official on-sale time. Photo: Getty

Lorde, says Webb, doesn’t like scalpers. “You can see it in her communications. She wants her fans to buy tickets, not weird companies from Scotland.” It’s true: in an email to fans announcing tickets for shows were on sale, she’d issued a veiled warning about scalpers: “You know the drill,” she wrote. “Good luck out there.” In London, Webb kept searching, and discovered “clumps of tickets” all at the same price. “They just look like clones. My guess is that these tickets don’t exist. I think they’re cloned listings.”

Webb has some evidence to support his suspicion. In August, Scottish website The Daily Record reported nearly $2 million in speculative tickets had been removed from Viagogo after a probe by the news outfit. Those tickets allegedly came from just one seller, based in Munich, who had listed 700 tickets alone for one Glasgow-based music festival. 

The Daily Record’s report also said this: “In another bizarre twist … Viagogo has said it will stand by another dubious seller, who used a false address in Dundee to list hundreds of tickets.” That, claims Webb, is the same seller listing tickets to Lorde shows in New Zealand. Is listing fake tickets even legal? “No,” says Webb. “It’s fraud.”

In the days that followed our chat, Webb’s words bounced around my head. I decided to keep an eye on Viagogo for tickets being sold for other local concerts. I didn’t have to look far. On August 4, tickets for a tour by rock act Shihad were due to go on sale through Ticketmaster. I’m a fan, and I was planning on buying two of them to the band’s November 27 show at the Powerstation. 

A few hours before the official on sale time, I checked Viagogo. They were already listed. Six general admission tickets that weren’t even on sale yet were on offer for $282, and another six were available for $286. Confused, I waited a few hours, and at midday, purchased two legitimate tickets from Ticketmaster for around $80, plus a bit extra for processing and handling fees. 

As confidence returned to the industry, and major artists began confirming post-pandemic tours, I kept checking in. After I missed out on general admission tickets to Tyler, the Creator’s July show at Spark Arena through Ticketmaster, I wondered if Viagogo might have them. They did. “Great! Tickets for Tyler, the Creator are available,” the website told me. They were more than $400 each. I didn’t buy them, instead claiming a legitimate seat, albeit in the nosebleeds, for $140. 

Earlier this week, tickets for Dua Lipa’s show in November 2022, went on sale, again through Ticketmaster. When I checked Viagogo just a few hours after the official on-sale time, dozens of tickets had already been listed. While I searched, a message popped up: “A customer bought four tickets to Dua Lipa in Auckland an hour ago,” it said. Whoever that is, I feel sorry for them. 

I asked Webb to look into the same shows and he found tickets were being listed for sale by companies based in Albuquerque and Finland. “I’d question why two pretty untraceable businesses in the US and Finland are targeting shows in New Zealand,” he said. “There’s definitely something fishy going on.” I asked him to elaborate. If you bought those tickets, would you get actual tickets? “Who knows?” Webb replies. He thinks the seller would take your money, attempt to buy much cheaper tickets, give you those, and pocket the surplus. “It’s the perfect crime, in a way, because you’ve got no risk.”

In a statement, Viagogo says all sellers are required to confirm they have the right to sell their tickets. “As sellers are not paid until the buyer has attended the event, there is no incentive for people to list a ticket that doesn’t exist,” a spokesperson said. Speculative ticket selling was not permitted on the site. “If a seller is found guilty of speculative selling they will face disciplinary proceedings and will be blocked from using our platform.”

Viagogo guarantees all ticket sales, the spokesperson said. Full refunds were rare. “No more than one per cent of all tickets sold worldwide on Viagogo in 2019 had any issues.”As for those Shihad tickets, the spokesperson pointed out the concert’s pre-sale had started the day before I bought my tickets, on August 3.

You don’t have to look far to find out what the local music industry thinks about Viagogo. I spoke to one local ticketing outlet that said it wasn’t just big arena acts by international artists being targeted by scalpers. It found itself a regular target for shows held at small venues around the country. The spokesperson gave one example where a punter had spent $700 on four tickets through Viagogo which should have cost just $44 each. The concert wasn’t even sold out. For an upcoming show by Chelsea Wolf, the original $60 ticket price had been raised to $247 for those purchased through Viagogo.

The promoter for Lorde’s tour, Brent Eccles, let it all out in an interview with Stuff over those fake VIP tickets. “It’s just a scam,” he told the news website. “Chances are you won’t be able to get in. You’ll have to buy another ticket and if it’s sold out, well, look at the situation that you’re in.”

Dua Lipa
Tickets for Dua Lipa’s Auckland show in November, 2022, were being offered on Viagogo hours after going on sale. (Photo: Getty Images)

Callum Mitchell, the promoter for the Electric Avenue festival, told me Viagogo had been an “ongoing issue” for years. “We’re powerless to do anything about it, other than warn people about Viagogo in our advertising where we can,” Mitchell said. “Unfortunately, the Commerce Commission, the courts, and the government in New Zealand seem powerless. People who use this site will continue to get ripped off, plain and simple.”

It’s not all bad news. The Commerce Commission has engaged Viagogo in court, and achieved results. Mitchell believes Viagogo’s reach and domination is diminishing. “I don’t think it’s as bad as it was a few years ago. There has been so much media coverage of their dodgy practices that most people are now aware that there’s a high chance you’d be buying a fraudulent ticket if you purchased it through Viagogo,” he says.

Webb agrees. He thinks more government regulation would help, along with artists banning ticket resales over face value, and ticketing moving to a mobile-only market. He compares it to the days of Napster. “It’s just like with music piracy. If you make it easy to share music, like Spotify or Apple Music, The Pirate Bay goes out of business because you’ve created a better system,” he says. “Ticketing is the same.” His hope is that one day his tireless campaign against the company will be over. “Viagogo is a voodoo market that doesn’t have to exist.”

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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

BusinessSeptember 24, 2021

Bernard Hickey: Fashion’s greenwashing problem and how to see through it

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

It’s getting increasingly tough to buy clothing that isn’t the result of practices that exploit both workers and the environment. Bernard Hickey talks to the founder of a local tech start-up that wants to help consumers all over the world make better choices.


Follow When the Facts Change on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.


Globalised supply chains have given us an endless choice of fashion for a mere fraction of what it used to cost – what, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know it still should cost. These mindboggingly complex and opaque chains of manufacturers and assemblers and transport systems are one of globalisation’s ultimate achievements. What’s not to love? Just-in-time supply chains producing beautiful things for prices that beggar belief. The trouble, we now know, is that it was too good to be true. And too fragile to withstand a shock.

Covid-19 was the earthquake that exposed just how little resilience was built into the system, let alone accountability or mechanisms to reflect the true cost of that t-shirt or those sneakers that look so good and cost so little. The price paid on Amazon or AliExpress or your local bargain chain store might cover the raw cost of the cotton, the slave-like wages of the seamstress and the indentured-labour costs of the container shipping crew, but not the carbon emissions from heating the plant, the water shortages created by the irrigated cotton farm, or the misery of the workers in the factories and fields upstream from the glossy website.

Now, with queues of container ships lined up off the coast of California, with empty shelves across New Zealand, and with prices rising to levels last seen in the 2000s, even the global capitalists are questioning the model of just-in-time supply systems that only an algorithm can manage or understand. One of the reasons for the stacks of containers in all the wrong places is the surge of demand from retailers and manufacturers ordering double their usual volumes to build up extra stock — just in case. The best gig in capitalism right now is owning a warehouse.

A pile of discarded clothing and textiles in Jakarta, Indonesia (Photo: Getty Images)

For me, the first sign that this system was not working came from the most unlikely place, and well before Covid. It happened in late January 2019 as I was driving my rubbish-filled station wagon up the road to Wellington’s southern landfill. I got stuck in a three-hour queue on a Sunday afternoon and couldn’t work out why everyone was cleaning out their closets and garden sheds all at once. The reason, I later realised, was a television show: Tidying Up with Marie Kondo had arrived on Netflix on January 1. All over the wealthy, industrialised west, people were inspired by Kondo to discard their cheap clothes, worn-once shoes and junky Ikea-ish bookcases – all at once. Prices for recycled clothing, plastic and other materials slumped globally. Op-shops were forced to close their doors.

It seemed to occur to everyone at the same time that we had consumed mindlessly and all this stuff wasn’t “sparking joy”. The conscious consumer movement has grown like topsy ever since, along with the influence of responsible investors wanting to know just how much carbon is emitted in the production of every t-shirt and toaster.

Now consumers want to know their purchases’ story too. They want to know they are not contributing to the oppression of a people or the extraction and destruction of acquifers and soil biomes. And they want to be able to compare one product against another, to know that someone who cares has checked, and that there is some accountability for the greenwashers.

All Things Considered co-founder John Holt (Photo: supplied)

Local venture capital and tech start-up veteran John Holt sees more than opportunity. He is on a mission to help these consumers, and the companies who face the same problems of consistency and accountability, to solve this filtering and discovery problem. Holt was behind one of the earliest New Zealand start-up successes, Sonar6, and has co-founded the likes of the Kiwi Landing Pad and Homes.co.nz. Now he has joined up with fashsion and retailing expert Andrea Van Der Meel to create All Things Considered (alltc.co.), a site for compiling, filtering, checking fashion companies’ claims, and for building a community of buyers, suppliers and consumers who can rely on the information and each other to make the right choices.

I spoke to Holt this week for this week’s episode of my When the Facts Change podcast, to find out more about All Things Considered, and why there is such a need for a place to sort fashion’s planet destroyers from its planet builders.

“It’s a US$2.5t industry,” Holt said. “Almost one in nine of every human on the planet is involved in some part of the supply chain and the teams working in it. And it’s one of the most significant contributors to a lot of the issues that we see daily, now, sadly, around the environment and in society.”

Regulators were starting to move, and the big fashion chains were starting to respond, but not always in a transparent or genuine way.

“Some of them have responded authentically, and some of them have not. So for a consumer, All Things Considered is about trying to navigate a huge minefield of claims and certifications and various marketing initiatives that are currently not being authentic,” he said.

All Things Considered uses a variety of metrics based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and starts by gathering comparable information from company websites.

“The mission for us is to create a community of considered consumers. Once they start talking about these different brands, and questions they have, we want to bring those brands into the conversation. So their community extends, not just from the consumers, but to the companies.

“So once you have that sort of conversation happening at scale, then you’re going to get the attention of the search engines.”

Little Yellow Bird’s Sam Jones, left, visiting her suppliers in India (Photo: Supplied)

I also spoke to Samantha Jones, the founder of Little Yellow Bird, a Wellington-based apparel designer, creator and importer that started by selling uniforms to corporates but has ended up selling as much as half of its clothes to online shoppers. Little Yellow Bird is one of the launch partner brands for All Things Considered. A former logistics chief in the NZ Air Force, Jones says she decided to build a clothing business that knew where its cotton came from, wasn’t wrecking the land and water that helped grow it, and treated workers and the planet in a way that wasn’t extractive and destructive.

“I spent a lot of time in India, networking and visiting and spending time working and volunteering in factories as well to really understand the process, tracing back the supply chain,” Jones said.

That includes finding cotton farms fed by seasonal rains rather than irrigation and finding factories that didn’t use child labour.

“There’s been a big shift in the last few years of people really starting to ask how the products are made, and where and what were the conditions,” Jones said.

“I think the problem is that a lot of times consumers don’t necessarily know how cheap it is, because there’s often no correlation between what they’re paying and what the factory might be being paid,” she said.

“There’s plenty of brands that still maybe sell the product at a price point where you would assume people will be getting paid decently. But once you understand how many middlemen are involved, or their business model relies on wholesalers, you can pretty quickly see that a t-shirt that’s maybe sold for $50 is wholesaling for $5 or $6, you can see where the factory cannot possibly have been given enough money to compensate their workers.”

“So that’s where I guess it becomes really difficult for consumers to actually know what they’re buying.”

Jones said many buyers and regulators know the wild west era of globalisation where anything went is coming to an end.

“People are more aware of it, and governments and organisations are trying to limit it, or limit the impacts of it. We can see that happening.

“I think there’s a whole new generation of people that are really interested in sustainability and really prioritise ‘non spending’ passions.”


Follow When the Facts Change, Bernard Hickey’s essential weekly guide to the intersection of economics, politics and business on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

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