Ahh they age old ticket scalper debate, are they a necessary evil, or are they just plain evil? Well, after a giant scam in Sydney, we’re certain a large group of pissed off people would opt for the latter.
Last Tuesday saw some 100 hopeful attendees of an Alt-J concert left sitting outside Sydney’s Enmore Theatre, unable to enter the venue as they’d been sold duplicate tickets by Gumtree user “Alex Ferrero” as Musicfeeds via News Limited reports.
It has been said that Ferrero had photocopied two legitimate PDF printable tickets to the show and sold them to numerous unsuspecting Alt-J fans who were unable to enter as the tickets had already been scanned through the system.
A staff member of News Limited, Carla Wainer was one of the many victims of this scan and had even met Ferrero in person when purchasing the tickets, “I was a bit sceptical about buying tickets off Gumtree. The fact that we met up, he let me take a photo of his ID and forwarded me the original email from Ticketek that his friend had apparently bought for him, made me think it was legitimate” adding that he seemed like a “really friendly guy.”
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Wainer’s boyfriend continued, “once ours [tickets] didn’t scan, we went to the box office to find out that there were already bunches of people with the same seller’s name on their PDF tickets, making us feel robbed, violated and pretty stupid that we placed our trust in this guy.” Before concluding “we saw at least 15 others in the same boat so that’s $1500 for Mr Alex Ferrero, and who knows how many more people after us he got.”
Unbelievably, this has not been the first time Ferrero’s name has been flagged for dodgy scalping on Gumtree, having allegedly ripped off folks who planned on attending Byron Bay’s Bluesfest, Listen Out Festival and even The Lion King stage show.
Gumtree spokesperson Niki Hennessy warned “the most important tip for those looking to purchase tickets via a secondary market is to use common sense, if a ticket listing sounds too good to be true, it probably is” while a statement from the police has told any scalping victim to “attend a local police station, provide a statement and have them investigate the matter.”
