How to stop ticket fraud and touting on your festival or live music event

Wherever there’s demand, people will try and take advantage. And the live events industry is no different. As an event organiser or fan, you’re constantly having to guard against the threat of ticket fraud, touting and scammers. 

Effectively combating these threats as an organiser will not only save you a lot of time, money, and sad fans, it’ll also improve the fan experience and be beneficial to your event’s brand and reputation.

Fortunately there are a number of things event organisers can implement to help prevent ticket fraud, touting and scamming. Here are just a few.

‍Use ticket limits

‍Touts rely on being able to scoop up the majority of tickets at an on-sale. They can use sophisticated scalping bots that will purchase large quantities of tickets with the sole aim of reselling for inflated prices and exploiting genuine fans. 

Installing a ticket limit at the point of purchase is a simple way to help combat ticket scalping, and helps get tickets into the hands of genuine fans.

‍Ensure each ticket is linked to an individual person

‍The transition to digital ticketing has come with a range of benefits, but one of the most important is the ability to assign a ticket to a specific individual. Ensuring each attendee must input personal information in order to activate their ticket on their mobile phone helps stop touts from easily holding and selling multiple tickets. To add another layer of security, event organisers can check that the attendee’s ID matches the name on the ticket.

Using our Ticket Management Portal is an effective way of doing this. Designed to cause no friction in the ticket-purchase funnel, the TMP requires attendees to activate their tickets by downloading the app and registering personal details. That means each ticket is assigned to an individual, giving organisers greater insight into who is actually attending their event.

‍Delay ticket fulfilment until the week before the event

‍Delaying sending tickets to customers immediately after purchase helps prevent touts from quickly buying and selling them on. It also gives you time to investigate any suspicious activity, and also make sure each ticket is assigned to an individual. 

If you send out tickets immediately, scammers could copy and sell the same tickets multiple times, particularly if the tickets are print-at-home e-tickets, or even steal a photo of a genuine ticket online, pass it off as their own, and use it to convince other fans to transfer them money.

Delaying ticket delivery is again something we wanted to be a key part of our Ticket Management Portal.

‍Use a ticketing platform that takes ticket fraud seriously

‍As organisers there’s only so much you can do, with a lot of responsibility falling on your ticketing provider to spot and take action against any suspicious activity. For example, here at Event Genius we work with our payment provider to set up a number of fraud prevention rules that flag any suspicious transactions. These can then be reviewed and investigated before either being approved or cancelled. 

‍Educate your fans on ticket scams and safe resale platforms

‍Ticket scammers and touts rely on exploiting fans desperate to get to that sold out event. They present their tickets as the only option, increase urgency, and pressure their victims into handing over money, sometimes for no tickets at all.

An effective way to combat this is by educating your fans on signs to look out for when purchasing resale tickets to guard against being scammed, and even better, providing a sale resale platform.

It’s easy to simply state that fans should not buy tickets via non-official channels and run the risk of being refused entry, but we think it’s better to recognise this is likely to happen and therefore work on providing a safe platform for fans to do so. 

If you’d like to find out more about how Event Genius can help you tackle ticket fraud either via our Ticket Management Portal or other means, get in touch with us today by clicking here. We’d love to hear from you.