Secondary Price Caps & Figuring Out Fact Vs. Fiction (Guest Post)

by Adam Webb, Campaign Manager, FanFair Alliance

Back in 2013, Ivanka Trump was widely lampooned for misappropriating one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century when she posted on Twitter:

“If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.” – Albert Einstein

As it turns out, Einstein never actually uttered these words. But 12 years on, and the unfortunate misquote appears to have been adopted as a lobbying strategy by viagogo, StubHub International and the rest of the so-called “secondary ticketing” market.

The reason? Price caps.

The idea clamping down on exploitative online ticket touting by enforcing a cap on ticket resale prices – a measure successfully introduced by countries such as Ireland and Australia – and which is now a stated commitment of the UK’s Labour Government.

As well as being widely supported throughout the music sector, caps are also backed by respected consumer groups such as Which? and the UK’s business regulator, the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA), who have been attempting – with some difficulty – to tackle the scourge of online ticket touting for almost a decade.

Understandably, like garlic to vampires, the concept is profoundly unpopular to a secondary ticketing sector that relies upon a combination of deception, artificially-created demand and consumer exploitation; and which essentially revolves around an industrialised and parasitic “business model”, where scalpers hoover up large volumes of tickets from the primary market and then attempt to price gouge genuine fans through a small number of “uncapped” resale websites.

In 2024, an investigation by Rob Davies of The Guardian revealed how some of the world’s biggest ticket touts and resale platforms, spooked by Labour’s plans, had held a fundraising dinner in a bid to derail them – drumming up £73,000 to kickstart a lobbying campaign.

“We are going to fight parliament, we’re going to fight government … because if we don’t, bottom line is we are all fucked,” explained one of the speakers that evening, the veteran ticket tout Tony McGowen, while assuring attendees, who included representatives from viagogo, StubHub International and Vivid Seats, that their involvement in said lobbying campaign would be granted anonymity.

For all their protestations that a cap would hinder the workings of a “free market” (read: the freedom for touts to bulk-buy with impunity, and rip off consumers) this initial lobbying campaign failed to take flight, and they are now struggling to muster a coherent defence of their business.

And unsurprisingly so.

Over the past decade, FanFair Alliance has collected and presented detailed evidence about the workings of the black market in ticket resale, and its dependency on unlawful and fraudulent practices.

Earlier, this month, for example, through the Daily Record newspaper, we investigated the current state of play on viagogo – demonstrating how more than 95% of tickets advertised for Scottish music shows on the platform were listed by touts, with the vast majority being registered outside the UK.

Incredibly, just two individuals – based in Croatia and the Czech Republic – were responsible for 39% of all viagogo’s music listings in Edinburgh.

In Glasgow, 60% of touted tickets came from businesses registered in North America. These included one enterprising firm from Dayton, Ohio – called, laughably, “Legit Tickets” – who were attempting to resell more than 2,000 tickets for an event in a 750-capacity venue.

We also found multiple breaches of UK consumer law and multiple examples of suspected fraud.

While our findings didn’t uncover anything surprising about viagogo’s dependency on ticket touts – a 2021 report by the CMA found that their “largest resellers account for the majority of their sales, with those in the top decile accounting for more than 70% of platform GTV” – they did elicit a sharp response from the new Culture Minister, Ian Murray MP.

In an op-ed for the Record, he confirmed that the Government remained committed to new legislation – calling out the secondary market, rightly, as a “systematic racket on fans, artists and venues.”

The counterattack from viagogo and StubHub International has been fascinatingly predictable.

Rather than fight evidence with evidence, they have instead embarked on a desperate last-ditch lobbying campaign – paying off public policy agencies, shadowy consumer groups and media organisations to present an alternative reality.

Central to this strategy is a March 2025 report authored by a public affairs & economics consultancy called Bradshaw Advisory. It hypotheses that the ticketing price caps introduced in Ireland and Australia have led to a dramatic increase in social media fraud. If you stop ticket touts exploiting consumers on “regulated” platforms like viagogo, suggest the authors, then they’ll just go and do it on Facebook Marketplace.

Suspiciously, this rather selective synopsis ignores the fact that social media fraud is already rife in territories where no cap in place. In the UK, for instance, major banks such as Lloyds and Santander regularly issue warnings of ticketing scams around major live events. Intriguing, it also fails to recognise the growing popularity of capped ticket resale services – such as Twickets, Tixel, See Tickets Fan-To-Fan or Ticketmaster Resale – that make it easier for genuine fans to resell at the price originally paid (or less).

Throughout the report, findings are based on “modelling” rather than hard evidence. For instance, Irish banks have told FanFair that their price cap has probably reduced fraud rates, while Australian consumer bodies have stated that they see no correlation between a price cap and social media fraud.

Perhaps most damning of all, Bradshaw also neglected to disclose that their findings were commissioned by StubHub International. This information was only added as an addendum after FanFair Alliance issued a complaint to the British Polling Council.

This hasn’t prevented viagogo and StubHub International presenting the findings to politicians and media as “independent” research. Research which they, for all intents and purposes, drew up and paid for.

But it doesn’t stop there. Once you’ve paid for the message, you then need to buy a messenger. And Bradshaw’s discredited findings have mostly been delivered by two organisations: We Fight Fraud and Get Safe Online.

As it turns out, these two supposedly credible “consumer” bodies, neither of which appear to have shown previous interest in ticket fraud, are also on the viagogo payroll – without declaring it. (If you’ve not spotted it reader, a pattern appears to be emerging…)

Finally, having bought the message and the messenger, you need a stage to deliver it. And viagogo is doing that part through paid advertorial partnerships with media brands such as the New Statesman, NME and Rolling Stone UK.

In the US, I believe they call this kind of campaigning “astroturfing” – the deceptive practice of hiding the sponsors of an orchestrated message or organisation.
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.

Which is where we find ourselves now. The despairing strategy of a sector in denial; that makes no acknowledgement of its inherent failings, and, and can barely muster a justification for its own existence.

Adam Webb is the Campaign Manager for the UK-based FanFair Alliance, established to unite members of music and creative community who wish to take a stand against industrial-scale online ticket touting.

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