Maria Chenery-Woods, the owner of TQ Tickets Limited, has been sentenced to four years in prison for running a multi-million pound ticket touting operation. TQ Tickets used over 100 identities to buy tickets for artists such as Lady Gaga and Ed Sheeran, which were then sold on secondary ticketing sites such as Viagogo for inflated prices. Between 2015 and 2017, TQ Tickets sold £6.5million worth of gig tickets, but trading standards officers found hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of unsold tickets when they raided its offices in Norfolk.
Chenery-Woods’s employee Paul Douglas was also jailed for two years and five months, while her husband and sister received suspended prison sentences for their roles in the fraudulent company. Chenery-Woods used a file of more than 100 identities to buy tickets from primary selling sites like Ticketmaster, including a 10-year-old child, a dead relative, and completely fake identities. The judge stated that Chenery-Woods acted “out of greed” and aimed to “rinse or fleece customers out of as much money as you could”.
During the trial, Sheeran’s manager Stuart Camp and promoter Stuart Galbraith gave statements discussing the “extensive measures” taken to prevent re-sellers putting tickets back on the market at inflated prices. Galbraith said: “Today’s verdict is good news for live music fans, who are too often ripped off and exploited by greedy ticket touts.” Lord Michael Bichard, chairman of National Trading Standards, described the sentencing as “another significant milestone in our work to combat online ticket touts”.
Chenery-Woods “corrupted” students and other young people into buying tickets in a “web of criminality” and Judge Simon Batiste stated that some secondary ticketing sites and possibly some primary sites were complicit in TQ Tickets’ activity. However, the judge added that this provided no mitigation for the firm’s actions. In unrelated news, Ed Sheeran recently played a surprise live set at a primary school in Brighton
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