Touts who have harvested Ed Sheeran’s concert tickets in bulk, planning to make quick buck off the British singer’s live performance in Malaysia later this year – you can say goodbye to your dream in reselling them at vast mark-ups.
As part of a crackdown on highly profitable resale portals such as Viagogo and Carousell, the passes will be invalidated by event organiser PR Worldwide, branding the secondary ticketing sites as ‘morally repugnant’ after listings appeared for gigs selling up to twenty times the asking price.
Tickets of genuine buyers will not be affected, and only those proven to have been re-sold will be cancelled. With that said, unlucky fans who bought tickets from illegal resellers may also face problems attending the event.
“We have investigated every transaction and found some suspicious ones. These suspicious transactions will be blacklisted. If we find that those tickets have been put up for resale, then the barcode will be disabled,” director of PR Worldwide, Anita Baskaran explained.
As for now, a number of confirmed scalpers have been identified to prevent individuals from reselling the tickets at atrocious prices and to discourage the public from buying tickets illegally as these may be invalidated.
A notice to this effect has been placed on MyTicket.Asia, the concert’s sole authorised ticketing agent, stating that it had encountered several instances where certain buyers purchased more than four tickets by doing multiple transactions with the same credit card.
The organisers stressed that they do not support any sub-selling of tickets in order to gain high margin profits and that it aimed to provide fair opportunities for all ticket buyers.
“We would like to remind you that the resale of ticket(s) at any price is strictly prohibited. Unlawful resale (or attempted unlawful resale) of a ticket will lead to seizure and cancellation of that ticket without refund or any compensation. Barcodes from such tickets will be disabled and you will be refused entry,” they explained.
The tickets, originally priced at RM198, RM298, RM358 and RM458 each, were snapped up within minutes after being released for sale online, resulting to unauthorised re-selling at inflated prices of between RM1000 to RM8369 each.
Well, well.. let’s just hope that these kind of situations will not repeat again in the future, ’cause you know.. some people would actually sell their kidneys to see this guy perform live. 🔥
