Coldplay and Blanco, secondary ticketing: 26 “scalpers” discovered with 15,000 tickets

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Crackdown on the secondary ticketing phenomenon one day before the first date of Coldplay’s Italian tour, the most awaited event of the Italian musical summer: Agcom and Guardia di Finanza discover 26 serial resellers who, through fraudulent methods, would have purchased 15 thousand tickets of 278 concerts and would have resold them at prices even multiplied by 10, with an illegal profit of over 2 and a half million euros. The operation involved all the main concerts of 2022 and 2023 in Italy. And it is historical in its own way, because for the first time it intervenes directly on those who do «scalping», i.e. buy and then resell.

Last September, following the news of online touting for Coldplay’s Italian concerts scheduled for 2023 – which immediately sold out – the Authority launched a supervisory activity with the support of the Guardia di Finanza, also to know the way concert tickets are actually sold in Italy.
The focus of the investigations, promoted by Agcom and conducted by the Special Nucleus for Goods and Services in Rome, focused on the organizational aspects and methods of marketing tickets for Coldplay’s and Blanco’s Italian tour concerts.

The examination of the ticket distribution processes for the two events highlighted the presence of 26 subjects who acted by improperly using multiple “accounts” to generate anomalous flows of tickets, circumventing the technical and security measures ordered by the Revenue Agency for the issue of electronic tickets for access to entertainment events. Thanks to the data and information provided by the primary resellers, the systematic operation of the identified accounts that purchased tickets for all the main concerts held in 2022 was then ascertained (Maneskin, Vasco Rossi, Andrea Bocelli, Blink 182, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John) and for those scheduled for 2023 (Coldplay, Madonna, Vasco Rossi, Peter Gabriel, Red Hot Chili Peppers). On the basis of the results of the investigations, the Authority and the Guardia di Finanza will proceed with the adoption of the consequent measures, each for the profiles within their competence.