WA Consumer Protection is investigating ticket resale website Viagogo for possible violations of state anti-scalping laws, in an effort to gather enough evidence to file a lawsuit.
These relate to markups on tickets to concerts by Billie Eilish, Justin Bieber and Tyler the Creator as well as a Harlem Globetrotters game, the Super Netball Grand Final and the Van Gogh Alive exhibition.
The tickets were sold for at least twice the original price and, he says, in one case, nine times as much.
WA significantly tightened its scalping protection in September 2021, with the Banknote Scalping Act (2021) prohibiting robots and prohibiting reselling a ticket for more than 110% of its original price.
Ad publishers who violate these laws are subject to prosecution, with fines of $20,000 for individuals, $100,000 for businesses, and $500,000 for those who use “bots” to buy.
Consumer Protection Commissioner Gary Newcombe said websites had a legal duty to identify illegal sales on their sites and remove such adverts immediately.
“Viagogo needs to do more to prevent these ads from appearing on its website because the law is broken as soon as illegal tickets are made available to the WA public,” he said.
“While Viagogo has removed some advertisements that have been brought to their attention by regulators, they should ideally take proactive steps to detect advertisements before they are published, or have them removed as soon as possible thereafter, without expect others to bring them to their attention.”
Consumer Protection executive director Trish Blake further told 6PR “Perth Live” that warnings to Viagogo had not stopped the problem.
“We are incredibly frustrated. We’ve had multiple communications with them about the laws, they told us they know the law and yet we continue to see ticket sales that violate those laws on their platform.
Viagogo responded by stating that over the past few years it has “significantly overhauled our platform to ensure sellers meet their local regulatory obligations, including in Western Australia.”
This included disclosing more pricing details at the start of the sale and greater transparency on ticket availability.
“Viagogo is thoroughly investigating recent events to ensure sellers are following our platform policies,” he said.
“We will continue to work with all regulators and welcome regulation that promotes competition and provides consumer choice, flexibility and protection.”
Federal Labor said it had heard the live industry’s complaint that ticket scalping should be dealt with at the national level rather than the current piecemeal state approach.
So far, only the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has taken legal action against Viagogo, doing so in August 2017 for false or misleading statements.
The result was a $7 million fine by the Federal Court in October 2020, with Judge Burley describing Viagogo’s conduct as willful and some of its misleading claims made “on an industrial scale”.
Viagogo’s appeal was dismissed in May 2022.
In July 2021, NSW Fair Trading launched an investigation after 36 complaints year-to-date Consumer Affairs Victoria received 334 contacts relating to event ticketing and ticket resale in the 2020-2021 financial year, compared to 655 in 2019-2020.
