As the whole of Australia tries to get tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour (what are you doing reading this!? Get in the queue) consumers are being warned about scammers keen to take advantage of ‘Swifties’ (and their parents).
There’s been ‘unprecedented demand’ for tickets to see the American songstress perform her ‘Eras’ tour which is touching base in both Sydney and Melbourne early next year. You could almost say it’s a love story.
Pre-sale tickets for the three Sydney shows went on sale at 10am today, whilst the tickets for Melbourne will follow at 2pm.
News.com.au understands that there are hundreds of thousands of people currently in the queue trying to get tickets.
With so much demand and fans (and their parents) desperate for tickets, leading consumer advocacy group CHOICE, has warned fans to be vigilant when it comes to protecting themselves from scammers. Sadly when it comes to scalping – the process of buying tickets and reselling them for a higher price – you can’t just shake it off.
Limited VIP packages to Swift’s tour were already being sold on for considerably more than the original selling price of $1249.
CHOICE found that VIP tickets for the Sydney concert were being sold for as much as $2678 per ticket on the reselling website Viagogo. Another major ticket reselling website, The Ticket Merchant, was reselling tickets for up to $1999 each.
Anti Scalping legislation in NSW prevents tickets being resold with more than a 10 per cent markup, so the resellers may be in breach of the law.
Ticket seller The Ticket Merchant told CHOICE that they have a compliance team who monitors the website and removes 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,” a spokesperson says.
“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 listings quite difficult.
Whilst scalping is hard to police, the federal government has been harsh with ticket resellers that haven’t done enough to prevent scalping.
In 2020, the Swiss-based company Viagogo was handed a $7 million fine in a Federal Court case brought on by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
NSW scalping regulation has the maximum penalties for breaching ticket scalping laws at $110,000 for a corporation or $22,000 for an individual.
That’s likely to leave a blank space in anyone’s wallet!
