UK Scalper Sentenced

Lupton was found guilty “of two counts of fraudulent trading and one count of money laundering,” IQ Magazine reports. Lupton’s registered companies – Lines Direct Ltd and Williams & Hill Ltd – failed to deliver £435,000 worth of tickets to its customers who had paid for them, according to the London Evening Standard.

While the court stated that Lupton wasn’t the brains of the operation, he was still acting as director of said companies, which may be why, as part of his sentence, he was also banned from becoming a company director for the next 10 years. Lupton’s name was first mentioned in the context of ticketing fraud in 2008, when a network of websites including chinaolympic2008tickets.com and summerfestivaltickets.com were investigated.

“The sites were apparently registered at an address in Thornton Heath by a Mr John Lupton. But Mr Lupton denies any knowledge of the scam and said someone must be using his name on the sites,” the newspaper reported back then.