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Business News Live Business
Festival promoters to send out tickets earlier in a bid to stop the scammers
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 3 May 2011
Live Nation and its subsidiary Festival Republic have both signed up to a plan put forward by the police to try to combat the sale of fake tickets for festivals.
Basically, both will send out tickets for their big summer events earlier than normal. In the past, the logic has been that festival tickets should be sent out relatively late in the day so that dodgy types can’t get their hands on tickets and manufacture fakes to sell, either online or outside the festival site. But police say that a bigger problem these days is ticket agents who take money off music fans online with no intent of sending them any tickets, real or fake.
Because said fans know official festival tickets often aren’t sent out until a few days before the big event they are not suspicious about their lack of tickets until the very last minute, when its often too late to do anything about it.
Deputy Chief Superintendent Steve Head of the City of London Police told the BBC: “We believe that [posting tickets early] would stop a lot of people being the victims, because we’d be able to act on it quicker, convicting the kind of people we want to convict”.
