the dangers of buying secondary market festival tickets

always buy from only from official ticket outlets

By Scott Williams | Published: Fri 14th Mar 2008

Isle of Wight Festival 2008 - the crowd @ Primal Scream
Photo credit: Karen Williams

Isle of Wight Festival 2008

Friday 13th to Sunday 15th June 2008
Seaclose Park, Newport, Isle of Wight, PO30 2DN, England MAP
£130 w/e (under-13 £65) with camping, £110 without (under-13 £55), campervans £250 - SOLD OUT
Daily capacity: 50,000

The BBC News website (here) has a story about six people who have been charged with conspiracy to defraud the Isle of Wight Festival by trying to sell fake tickets and wristbands. The story highlights the dangers of buying tickets or wristbands from unofficial websites, ticket touts or people outside festivals.

It's another reminder to festival fans of the importance of buying only from official ticket outlets and the risk from buying secondary sellers. Even many of the well known secondary ticket selling sites offer tickets that they don't actually have. Getting a refund (which usually is in the form of vouchers to re-purchase from their site) is no consolation for spending the money for a festival that you can't go to.

Worse still is the fact that sometimes unwary internet users are duped by swindlers on unknown ticket website while they desperately search for sold out festival tickets online.

Their search often takes them to spurious sites where they are asked to feed in their credit card details along with their personal information with the result often being that they are not just short of a ticket but also the subject of ID fraud through inputting their personal credit card information and contact details.

Festival goers are best advised to treat offers of tickets for sold out events with great suspicion, and only make online purchases from trusted sites, and not part with their money once a festival has sold out. If you can't get tickets to one festival then why not consider buying tickets to another festival instead?


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