Features
Ticketing Investigation Fingers ICO
A Danish TV consumer affairs program fingers
Reporters from “Operation X,” screened by TV 2, posed as new promoters and asked Eric Baker’s secondary ticket-seller how much money they could make from feeding tickets through Viagogo.
They were told that they could get 90 percent of the extra money, with Viagogo holding on to 10 percent, and that it was the same deal for major promoters such as ICO.
ICO’s Kim Worsoe says he hasn’t seen the program, which was due to air at Sept. 6 at 8 p.m., and claims that he no longer supplies tickets to the secondary site.
“We don’t work with Viagogo – we did in the past,” he said. “On the very few occasions that we used Viagogo, it was on headline acts and we did so with the knowledge of the artist.
“It was very limited. No more than 450 tickets in two years,” Worsoe said.
ICO also owned up to supplying Viagogo with tickets for its Copenhagen Live Festival in 2010, which had a bill that included
Selling tickets for more than face value is against the law in Denmark, although government consumer affairs ombudsman Kathrine De Neergaard recently told the Politiken newspaper there are legal complications with a prosecution.
“Even through Viagogo’s practice is illegal in Denmark it is very difficult to act upon, because what they are doing is fully legal in England and presumably also in Switzerland, where the company operates from,” she said.
ICO was named in a 30-second clip from the “Operation X” program that’s already been posted on the TV2 website. It can be found here and also shows reporters chasing ICO chief Arne Worsoe, Kim’s father, in an effort to get a comment.
Using a hidden camera, the full program is believed to show “a large proportion” of Viagogo’s sales are for tickets the company has obtained via various methods.
Rather than being put up for sale by fans who can’t get to the show, most tickets have come direct from the promoter or from “Super Sellers,” professional touts who buy as many tickets as possible with the intent of reselling through secondary sites.
“Operation X” journalist Signe Holme Øhlenschlæger told Pollstar her team also found that Viagogo often sells tickets it doesn’t have.
“There were times when we bought tickets and when they arrived, we noticed a date on the ticket that showed they’d been bought from Billetnet after we had bought and paid for them,” she said.
The program also uncovered a problem with Viagogo reselling fake tickets. At a recent
Øhlenschlæger says the program found no evidence that tickets for Coldplay and
She said LN assured “Operation X” that any of their tickets that appeared on the Viagogo site were probably bought by the “Super Sellers,” which use teams with a large pile of credit cards and false identities.
Even before the program aired, it caused Google to block Viagogo because Øhlenschlæger’s team told the search engine giant it was selling tickets for more than face value.
Viagogo will no longer appear at the top of the page when Danes search for concert tickets, while Google’s lawyers check whether the secondary seller is breaking Danish law.
On Aug. 14 another Danish TV investigation called “Kontant” (or “Cash”) showed that Viagogo’s employees buy huge numbers of tickets at the normal price, usually from authorised sellers, and sell them to consumers at two or three times face value.
The “Operation X” programme also uses footage from “Dispatches,” the UK TV documentary on the secondary market that Channel 4 screened in February.