A difficult problem to manage.
Even mothers with children are deceived
Liz O’Driscoll wiped tears from her eight-year-old son Liam’s face. The guy didn’t calm down. I came with my mother to the first home match of my beloved Liverpool from a small town in Ireland. His county is 570 kilometers from Anfield Road. The trip was a gift for 8-year-old Liam. Mum found people in Dublin who advised her where to get tickets. Paid 200 pounds. When I showed the passes to the other fans on the bus, they said the tickets looked like the real thing. But the turnstile turned red: they slipped in a fake for the Aston Villa game in November.
Liz called the dealership’s number, but as expected, no one answered. That day, Wales’ Dylan Williams also heard about counterfeit tickets at Anfield Road. I came to the match with two friends and paid £270 for each visit to the Liverpool stadium. A standard story before every Reds home game. A stadium steward said that in the past they only cheated on the eve of Liverpool’s big games against their rivals or before Champions League battles. Now, according to a club employee, there are crowds of deceived Reds fans before every match.
Anfield Road has recently been rebuilt. The stadium can now accommodate 61,276 spectators. But the success of Slot increased demand for tickets. Fans who have long dreamed of entering the legendary stands want to see their favorites in a successful series. Season ticket holders receive 28,000 tickets. The waiting list to be among the lucky few with a home game pass was closed seven years ago. When the stadium was expanded, they appealed to fans who had been waiting for 25 years for a season ticket to Liverpool matches. Rival ultras receive around 3,000 stadium tickets.
Another 11,000 are available for free to give fans who don’t live on Merseyside a chance. The remaining tickets are sold by drawing to official supporters of the club. This is a bonus for annual contributions. As you can see, it’s not easy to attend a Liverpool home game. Especially if you don’t want to overpay for the most expensive seats available. Scammers of different levels are very popular in Liverpool. Some people resell tickets at a very high price, although this is illegal. Others simply make fake passes, and that is pure crime.
Organized crime in action
The move from paper tickets to electronic tickets has changed the approach of fraudsters. Season pass turnover is huge; Scammers use sophisticated methods. There are millions of pounds at stake, with Liverpool earning around €100m each season on matchdays. The club’s security services arrested mafia representatives who were trying to get a job as a ticket clerk at the stadium in order to gain access to the ticket sales system. Another method used by bandits is to intimidate club employees. They look for a victim among their friends and make threats.
This was not successful because Liverpool has enough connections to hire ex-police officers and people in specific professions who could intimidate anyone. But there is another method: hackers. Last summer, there were constant cyberattacks aimed at disrupting access to websites selling tickets to Liverpool matches. It is important that the attackers offer a fake website. If a foreigner who buys tickets to a Reds match for the first time sees a fake portal, he is unlikely to immediately understand that he has been deceived. Especially if you mirror the club’s website.
Liverpool are aware that scammers are damaging their reputation. One way or another, team representatives are responsible for security when selling tickets. Last season alone, when many dreamed of seeing Klopp for the last time on the sidelines, around 100,000 fake social media accounts were closed, where they attempted to sell fake or real tickets at a lower price. pupil. One and a half thousand stolen tickets were canceled. Issued 47 lifetime bans to people who participated in ticket scams. And 136 other people lost their right to subscriptions.
During the new season, fewer fake pages have been closed, but there have already been 47 lifetime bans from visiting the stadium. There is a lot of demand, everyone wants to see Salah before he leaves. Three Liverpool FC staff investigate ticket fraud every day. In addition, they sometimes have to fight not only with organized gangs, but also with season ticket holders. To make extra money, they exchange the buyer’s passport for their phone with an e-ticket. A person enters the stadium with someone else’s season ticket, pays money and, after the match, exchanges their phone number for their important documents.
Liverpool cops are useless
The guys from the Liverpool security service and the club’s cybersecurity department do not give their names, because they understand that after that they will face death threats from the mafia. But there are serious specialists there. They understand that they cannot expect help from the police. Last season, club security guards arrested a man with counterfeit notes and money near the stadium. The police formalized the seizure of the money, but a lawyer came and the man was immediately released. The investigation is ongoing, but even the existence of a 1994 law prohibiting the resale of tickets does not help the big guys. nuclear submarine.
The police don’t want to bother with such cases. Prosecutors are reluctant to open investigations. The judges don’t care, they have subscriptions for expensive places. The police say they are helping the club, but that is not true. Scammers mainly target people who have no experience purchasing tickets. Often, they are even strangers. At the same time, prosecutors now have two cases linked to the mass sale of counterfeit tickets for Liverpool matches. The amount of damage amounts to 8 million pounds. It’s not just Merseyside thugs at work, but also organized criminals with resources.
To cheat out of 8 million, you have to sell 30,000 tickets at 270 pounds. And those are just two things. How many counterfeit tickets are there per season? There are scammers who, at the time of payment, send a message to victims that they have been deceived. “The nobles.” They don’t want people to waste time traveling to Liverpool. At the same time, the fraudster himself may be somewhere in Thailand. Only the stupidest cheaters are caught. Two friends were selling fake tickets for the Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid. One was imprisoned for 8 months and the other for 2 years.
Small fish, but the whales are still on the loose with millions of pounds in revenue each season. For example, for tomorrow’s match between Liverpool and Manchester United, a ticket with a face value of 50 pounds is sold for 453, or almost 62,000 rubles. Besides, this is the same site where three friends from Wales bought their fake tickets. Another popular scheme among scammers is to sell a real ticket dozens of times. Only the buyer who arrives first will enter the stadium. Others will be deceived; the turnstile will not let them access the match of their beloved Liverpool.
Cunning scammers register thousands of accounts and try to win real tickets to resell. Liverpool is fighting this, but the world of new technology is helping the criminals. And I would like to end this sad story with a warm fact. When fans outside the stadium discovered scammers had fleeced boy Liam and his mother Liz, they found them two tickets for the Aston Villa match. But there are deceived people nearby who are less fortunate. A woman asks: “How do scammers sleep at night?” » Good question, but psychopaths don’t feel guilty about crimes.
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