Aston villa fan scammed out of £2k for England tickets

He contacted a tout on twitter offering tickets at £2000 a piece and sent a deposit of £2k with a second ticket being paid for when he collected. Except the person took the money and disappeared.

Now as harsh as this might sound am I wrong to think this is karma? He wanted to buy illegal tickets and he's been took for the pillock that he is.

He's also said that he's reported it to his bank but for what? It's like contacting your bank and saying 'i ordered some heroin last week and they never delivered it'.

 

Anyone willing to pay £2k for a ticket to anything needs to see a professional.

 

I’d pay anything to watch the reds to be fair...

 

If he's paid via paypal or debit/credit card, he can get his money back. The Paypal option is easy, and for the bank he would contact them to do a charge back, and explain the circumstances...

 

But how do you explain that the illegal item you attempted to buy wasn't delivered?

 

I didn’t know you use heroin? It normally has the opposite effect on people. Interesting...

 

Very harsh. Very few people are going to be selling tickets for face value. Demand hugely outstrips supply, and looking at some of the prices tickets are changing hands for, £2000 a piece isn't the most ludicrous sum I've seen (I think face value is around £700). The vast majority of people selling tickets aren't out to scam people, and most of them won't be professional touts, just people who've ended up with extra tickets for whatever reason, aren't able to go etc. So from the point of view of the buyer, I don't see what he's actually done wrong. He really wants to see the game, and the going rate for a ticket is several times the face value. What do you actually expect him to do? Wait around in case one pops up for the original price, on the grounds that paying more is illegal? I paid double face value for my World Cup semi final ticket in 2018, around $400. I was lucky as I picked it up the day before the game off a guy in St Petersburg who couldn't travel. The going rate on the day of the game in Moscow on the streets was double that. Should I have waited for a face value ticket to appear? I think I may have been waiting for a long time. From the point of view of the seller (who was not a tout, just someone who happened to have a spare ticket), should he have sold it at face value, despite being offered much more money by several different people?

 

"In the United Kingdom resale of football tickets is illegal under section 166 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994" So that's what SuperTyke is talking about. It is unlikely that you would have payment protection on the purchase of an illegal item.

Of course there is a difference between legality and morality but paying for resold tickets is only encouraging touts, creating the market and making the situation worse so morally it's dubious even if as you say, it could be someone that just couldn't go in the end. Unlikely though, surely?

 

Not particularly unlikely, especially under the current circumstances. I have had to offload tickets a couple of times at international tournaments due to travel issues. Once mine, once a mate's. Because there were broader travel issues for both matches I ended up selling for under face value. I also bought tickets for the Euro 2012 semi final in Donetsk thinking this was England's likeliest path and sold them as we unexpectedly won the group and ended up in the other half of the draw. Nobody offered me more than face value as there were plenty knocking around.

I completely agree with you that touting shouldn't be encouraged, but it's important to draw the distinction between people who buy up multiple tickets with the intention of selling them on at a grossly inflated price, and those who are trying to get rid of tickets that they'd bought with the intention of using them.

I still think it's very unfair to take the moral high ground against the buyer as well, especially as he has been horribly ripped off, having bought the tickets in good faith. Are you going to pass judgement on me for paying more than face value for my WC semi final ticket, bearing in mind that I had already booked flights to Moscow, and there was a zero percent chance of finding one cheaper? Imagine if it were Barnsley in the FA Cup Final and you didn't have a ticket. Someone offers you one for double face value and it's your only option to see the match. I don't believe there's a single person on this site who would refuse it on "moral grounds", providing they could afford to pay for it.

 

Absolutely; you're a wrong un

Disclaimer: I'm way too tight to even pay face value for tickets for events so don't pay me any heed.

 

That absolutely goes without saying!

 

I would.

 

Someone coined £30k for 3 x tickets on raffall. https://raffall.com/248044/enter-raffle-to-win-3x-euro-2020-final-tickets-hosted-by-alex-wilk

 

I believe it is wrong to think this is Karma, it is theft a scam whatever you want to call it , people have always bought & sold tickets & you are saying they are illegal tickets but they are genuine tickets that someone else was supposedly selling for a profit , if you bought a car that went up in value would you only sell it for the price you paid or would you sell it for the market value ? I think I know the answer , I think the guy has tried to buy in good faith & has been ripped off, definitely not Karma .

 

I don't see why every big event doesn't have a ticket exchange through which people can legally transfer them to others at face value. They manage it for the cricket.

 

I think they actually do. But now many people are going to sell for face value when in some cases they're literally being offered ten times what they paid? Fair enough, some people wouldn't accept it, but most would. It's human nature, and the sums of money are hugely significant for some.

Fair enough. You've obviously got more moral fibre than me! Personally, Barnsley in a cup final (or England in the final stages of a big tournament) is quite possibly a once in a lifetime event. Not something I'd ever want to miss.

 

Genuinely...I wouldn't put money in the hands of touts or those wanting to profit from tickets, every time people buy into it it removes tickets further away from true fans...I'm not suggesting you're not a true fan, but a lot of those £2k tickets will be bought by corporate arseholes to impress their clients.