Glastonbury Sells Out - How to Avoid Fake Tickets
If you’re a hardened festival goer then there’s quite a good chance that you spent Sunday morning frantically hitting F5 trying to buy tickets for next year’s Glastonbury.
The first batch of coach tickets reportedly sold out in 23 minutes on Thursday, and although the website struggled under the strain of demand the rest were snapped up in just 50 minutes on Sunday despite no line-up and coveted Pyramid Stage headliners not being announced as yet.
With demand so incredibly high for arguably the biggest music festival in the world, it’s easy to see how eager fans who are anxious to attend often find ways of procuring tickets from elsewhere other than from the official retailer.
Glastonbury has been the target of ticket scams in the past, with one case going to court involving 29 instances of people buying £23,000 worth of fake tickets from a fraudster so notorious that Worthy Farm’s own Michael Eavis stepped in to deny that they were employed by the festival.
To combat ticket fraud through touts, Glastonbury Festival uses a photo registration system which are individually personalised to the named ticket holder and are non-transferrable whilst they also use just one authorised ticket agency to handle sales.
Despite this there are some fans who, whether knowingly or not, will buy fake tickets from bogus sellers and miss out on their Glastonbury experience. Action Fraud, the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud and cyber crime, offers the following advice for anyone looking to buy tickets online safely:
- Check with the event organiser, promoter or venue how and when tickets are being distributed.
- Check where the company’s office is and whether they have a landline in this country and a proper address rather than a PO box.
- Check online if there is adverse criticism of the company.
- Ask questions, such as when the ticket will be dispatched and what type of ticket you are buying.
- Read the terms and conditions on all but particularly not known websites (some ticket websites state quite clearly that there are no refunds).
- Pay for tickets by credit card – the issuer is jointly liable for a failure for goods or services to be provided as long as the price of a single ticket is more than £100 (but less than £30,000) but check with your card provider how long the period of liability is if the event is further ahead.
- Check the payment pages are secure by looking for a padlock symbol in the address bar, and making sure the website address begins with ‘https’.
For those of you who missed out on tickets but still hold out hope for attending next year, there is a resale in April 2017 for any returned tickets, whilst volunteering opportunities through Festaff and Oxfam can get you in if you’re willing to break up your weekend with litter picking, barwork or stewarding.
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