Standing up to the ticket touts

Those refused entry get a letter advising them why they've been refused entry so they can claim a refund. But, true, that's not the same as seeing the show.

But if it does make people think twice about using the secondary market (selling and buying) at exorbitant prices, then all well and good.

I admire Nimax for doing this.

So hang on, does that mean there were 60 empty seats that performance? 

That's actually a very interesting question - do they see where the seats are located, make the re-sold tickets void and then offer them as returns to the queue of people undoubtedly waiting outside? Though I read it as 60 people in total since the run began, as opposed to 60 people in one go.

Secondary ticketing sites are required (by law, per the Consumer Rights Act) to state the precise location of tix offered for sale, and this would make detection easy, but for some reason this doesn't seem to be enforced, so the tickets sold only state "row H" or whatever (plus the face value which must narrow it down a bit). But I'm still stuck on how they "identify" the touted tickets. Unless it's to do with purchasing patterns, and they can link a bunch of purchases to a particular IP address and test them that way? Photo ID (as at the Kate Bush concerts) works much better, but is hugely intrusive, delays the whole proceedings and creates a problem when people buy tix as presents (which may well happen quite a lot for Potter).

Note: there may be an answer which is along the lines of "we have other ways, but we don't want to talk about them". Which would be OK, as long as those other ways work...

They seem quite happy to turn mine away. Although I rarely try, I'm not usually very successful.

Perhaps they don't have a way to identify touted tickets, only fake ones. It's like the old TV Detector Van idea: the government pushed the idea of vans that could detect the signals from your TV so they could tell if you had a TV without a licence, but a far easier way than using state of the art direction finding equipment is to use the threat of being caught to encourage people to be honest. All that's necessary is for people to think they'll be detected.

Yes well done Nimax !

No idea how they do it, unless they have simply found a block bought/credit card/booking name and then traced them back via the ticket dates etc. But I agree it's more important as a warning and people think they WILL get caught and therefore don't buy as much.

It's a typical 'ruins it for the rest of us' when there's now worries for people who have bought tickets as gifts or the rare person who may end up unable to go so passes it on to someone they know (for money or otherwise) and the fear these genuine 'resale' people will run into trouble.

I do think though the way after them is to stop people wanting to buy rather than the touts themselves.

I can recall Shane Richie boasting in his autobiography that when he was in Grease at the Dominion, he was selling his comps to ticket touts and getting the profits.

The whole resale business does my head in. The football team I support got rid of their completely fair and FREE ticket exchange system, where you list the match you can't make, and if someone buys the ticket, you get the money back.

They now use StubHub which for the first season they implemented it, allowed people to charge what they wanted. After a huge amount of campaigning from the supporters trust, they put a cap on the amount you can charge above face value but it's still high.

I much prefer the 'fan to fan' exchange and honestly I think if more implemented THAT sort of thing, especially for things like Potter it would work better. www.twickets.co.uk/ is a fantastic example of what I mean.

I do think however, that there will always be some mugs that will happily pay an obscene price and that's why they continue to thrive.

Aka Fame Bitchy