It is very easy to say that the Internet has made our lives so much better in so many ways, one of its possible downsides might well be that it tends to make people lazy. In other words if you wanted to make some, cannot purchase in the pre-Internet days, there was no such thing as having a luxury of surfing the web looking for the best deal online. If you want to buy a fridge or a washing machine you went down to the local high street and shopped around for the best bargains. If you want to go to a major football match or see your favourite band in concert, you went down to the stadium or the booking agent and waited for how long as it took until you got your hands on those prized tickets.
Nowadays all that has changed and, it has to be said, mostly for the better. However there is a very grey area when it comes to buying any form of ticket online, be it for a football match or a concert. In fact in true terms it is really illegal. Yet there are a number of websites that blithely ignore the law by selling tickets for just about any occasion you can imagine, and all way above the ticket price.
How these websites make their money is either through buying tickets on their own or purchasing them from a second party for resale. While this may seem fair, anyone who has ever taken a close look at any form of concert ticket will notice, printed on it is a statement declaring that a ticket that has been purchased for any occasion can only be used by the individual who bought it, and can neither be sold nor transferred at a higher price.
Not that this phenomenon is in no way new, and anyone who has ever attended a concert or important soccer and rugby match, even the Wimbledon tennis championships will liable to have spotted out of the corner of their eye, a dodgy looking "scalper" selling tickets at the last minute for a profit. While this was also illegal it was also virtually untraceable as all the transactions were made in cash and there was no recourse.
However once these forms of transactions go online then not only is the website who sell the tickets breaking the law, also the person who sells them as well as buys them is liable to suffer the outcome of criminal procedures.
Already there have been some precedents where high-profile ticket seller websites have been exposed to the diligence of an eagle eyed event organiser who identified tickets that had been given in a block for public relations purposes and had been sold on to the, possibly unsuspecting, public at a profit. Theoretically the event organiser was within their rights in saying that the people who attended the event with tickets that were procured illegally were actually trespassing. After considerable pressure from the authorities the website owners were obliged to divulge not only the source of the tickets but also who they were sold to. At this stage, criminal proceedings are reported to be in the offing.
The moral of the story may well be that tickets for venues are a sensitive issue and if it is possible to order them online directly from the source then all well and good. However when it comes to dealing with an online scalper it's very much a case of let the buyer beware.
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Article Source: What To Look For When Buying Concert And Venue Tickets Online.
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