Two people have been found guilty of fraudulent trading in relation to a ticket touting firm that sold millions of pounds of tickets for artists such as Ed Sheeran and Little Mix on secondary ticketing sites.
Lynda Chenery and Mark Woods were convicted by a jury at Leeds crown court over their involvement in Norfolk-based TQ Tickets Ltd, which sold tickets worth more than £6.5m overall on sites including Viagogo.
Chenery, 51, and Woods, 60, both of Dickleburgh, near Diss, were found guilty of three counts of fraudulent trading, the court confirmed on Wednesday.
TQ Tickets was run by Maria Chenery-Woods – the sister of Chenery and the wife of Woods – who referred to herself as the “Ticket Queen”. A 2016 Guardian and Observer investigation into touts named her as one of the big players in the secondary ticketing market, where sites take commission on resales, often at a vastly inflated price.
Her company used multiple identities, some fake, to buy large numbers of tickets for artists such as Gary Barlow, Lady Gaga and Liam Gallagher on primary sites, including Ticketmaster, before reselling them – often for inflated prices – on secondary ticketing platforms such as Viagogo, prosecutors for National Trading Standards (NTS) told the trial.
The touts “exploited the love and passion” of genuine music fans by reselling through Viagogo and StubHub, as well as Get Me In! and Seatwave, two now defunct sites owned by Ticketmaster, the trial heard.
Chenery-Woods, 54, also of Dickleburgh, and Paul Douglas, 56, of Pulham Market, Norfolk, had previously pleaded guilty to fraudulent trading at Leeds crown court. The four defendants will be sentenced at a later date.
The verdicts followed an investigation by NTS, which enforces consumer protection, and was the latest in a series of its prosecutions against secondary ticketing touts.
In a statement, Lord Michael Bichard, the NTS chair, called the prosecution a landmark case for the consumer protection body. “I hope this prosecution supports progress towards a step-change in the secondary ticketing market, making it easier and safer for consumers buying tickets in future,” he said.
Stuart Camp, Sheeran’s manager who is also a director of Grumpy Old Management Ltd, said: “We want to keep ticket prices accessible for as many people as possible … Today’s prosecution will help protect music fans and sets an important precedent in the live entertainment industry.”
When NTS charged the defendants in the TQ Tickets case it also brought a similar criminal prosecution against a couple who ran the London-based firm BZZ.
Peter Hunter and David Smith were jailed for four years and 30 months respectively in February 2020 and were subsequently ordered to pay back more than £6.2m by the court.
Hunter was also named in the 2016 Guardian investigation, which found that touts can buy hundreds of tickets at a time and sell them on via secondary ticketing websites, with huge mark-ups. In 2016 one ticket for Adele at the O2 Arena in London was listed on Get Me In! for £24,840, about 290 times the face value.
